Still deciding on whether it’s time to embrace the cloud? Here are a few quick thoughts on why the answer should be yes.
Efficiency
Save time, money and Ibuprofen. The traditional datacenter approach leads to either over or underutilization of resources. When datacenters are being underutilized the infrastructure is costing you and when it’s over utilized the loss of productivity and down time is still costing your business. Azure is a pay-for-use model. You only pay for what you use, as granular as down to the minute.
Decreasing business costs using Azure should never be underestimated. If your business has peak load and idle times, you’re likely paying for resources you shouldn’t be. If you’ve purchased or are planning to purchase additional hardware to stay ahead growth demand, you’re paying for periods of excess capacity. With Azure your company only pays for what you use and not what you think or plan on using in the future.
Quit paying for complete servers when all you really need is a website, SQL, NoSQL only part of the time or even a Big Data job to run once a month.
Elasticity
Azure supports effectively unlimited scale, including the ability to scale only the layer of your application that requires it most. Azure VM and Cloud Services range in size from 1 core up to 32 cores in G Series offerings. These are just the building block for potentially massive cloud clusters that can span across regions, vNets and Hybrid solutions that enhance your applications and business continuity.
Too often the elasticity of the cloud is only seen in the context of large scale scenarios like burst to cloud or scale on demand. Don’t lose site of the fact that it works the other way also, Azure can reduce scale as easily as expanding, saving resources and costs. Both directions, scaling out and scaling in can be automated based on performance or a predefined schedule.
Resiliency
Enjoy your evenings and weekends again. Most Azure resources are guaranteed at 99.9% up time via a service level agreement (SLA). You can easily check worldwide health of services with the Azure data center dashboard or RSS feeds (Azure Status). All data stored in Azure (Azure storage or SQL Azure) is locally replicated three times by default. In the unlikely event the Azure services hosting your application or data fails, Azure will bring it back up automatically.
If your business requires geographical redundancy to cover business requirements Azure has that covered too, your application and data can span across multiple Microsoft data centers located around the world. Even if an entire data center were lost, the other would still be running and servicing requests. Azure runs on globally across 19 regions in Microsoft-managed datacenters [2].
Currently more than 57% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Azure today [1] , so you’ll be in good company, sleep better and have happier users.
Agility
Microsoft’s vision on Azure is wide open, Azure supports most operating systems, languages, tools, and frameworks. You’re not limited to Windows operating systems and several flavors of Linux are supported including, Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE and more run in Azure. This is also true for data service like SQL, NoSQL and Big Data.
Your team is probably already experts with Azure supported languages already C#, .Node.js, PHP, Python and Java to name few. Azure puts the best of the Windows and Linux ecosystems at their disposal, enabling them to build applications and services that work with every device from virtually anywhere.
Are you ready?
Would you like to learn more about Windows Azure? Begin the process today, our experienced team of Microsoft Certified consultants can help you elevate your business to the cloud.
