Microsoft Azure – a premier cloud platform by Microsoft – is one of the fastest growing Cloud Infrastructure Platform contributing to a significant revenue growth for Microsoft since its launch in 2010. Azure not only possesses strong PaaS capabilities but also considered as the only major cloud platform leader for IaaS, currently. 

But, what is it that’s making Azure the first choice for many IT professionals?

It’s the numerous benefits and unmatched features in terms of Data, Management and Business, which contribute in its gaining traction as the cloud infrastructure. 

Data:

1. Deeper Insight On Big Data

The services provided by Azure are extremely powerful and allow users to handle and analyze any volume of data at any given point of time. Moreover, its integration with Microsoft Excel allows users to visualize captured data in different ways. This will help in culling out better business insights to make well-informed future decisions.

2. Much Reliable & Effortless Data Storage

Whether it is file data, structured data sets or certain queries, Azure lets you store all type of data in a fast and reliable environment. The same can be easily shared across virtual machines using SMB 2.1 industry standard protocol. Also with the help of import/export feature, the stored data can be moved as per requirements.

3. Optimum Level Of Data Security

There’s no concern for security of your data with Microsoft Azure as it is built on one of the most secure, proven and tested developing platform all over the world – Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle.

4. Easy Integration Of Data Throughout The System

Azure is compatible with all Microsoft SaaS and PaaS offerings like Visual Studio, System Center, Active Directory, Office 365, Dynamics ERP and many more. This helps in making the most of your ERP, CRM and other related business data in a much faster and reliable manner.

5. Timely Backups Contributing In Better Disaster Recovery

Azure Site Recovery, a powerful disaster recovery solution, guarantees 99.9% data backup availability as data is replicated 6 times and kept separately over two Azure data centers. Thus, in case of a disaster, you can be completely sure about your data safety and availability.

Management:

1. Ease Of Automating Tasks

To eliminate time spent on task monitoring and resource maintenance in a cloud environment, Azure provides an option to automate the entire process through workflows known as ‘runbooks’. This will ultimately help in reducing the overhead costs and lets you focus more on value added business processes.

2. Provides Job Scheduling

Several recurring tasks like log cleanup, application maintenance, pulling data from an API, etc. require frequent manual intervention, which can be hectic at times. With the help of Azure’s scheduler, you can easily automate these tasks to run at a pre-scheduled time.

3. Caters API Management

If there’s a need to create and run various APIs, then Azure API management allows its users to publish those APIs to their potential market securely.

4. Easy Deployment Of Virtual Machines

Azure allows deployment of premium virtual machines, including Linux and Windows, in a just a few minutes. Just attach premium storage to your VMs and start utilizing 32 TB of storage per VM with > 50,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per VM at < 1 millisecond latency for read operations.

5. Better Collaboration Among The Dev Team

With Visual Studio Online and Application Insights features present in Microsoft Azure, developer teams can collaborate with each other seamlessly in a highly integrated environment. Also, its compatibility with technologies like ASP, PHP, Python and Node.js assures that you are not limited to using Visual Studio only.

Business:

1. On-Demand Scalability

Businesses grow with time, same is with the demand for new technology and processing more data. Azure provides an advantage to its users to scale it according to the growing business needs. Moreover, there’s an option to automatically scale the server capacity based on increased load or a certain schedule.

2. Fully Customizable

With numerous application building blocks and services provided with Azure, it is very easy to adapt and customize as per the business-specific needs. It can also quickly evolve as your needs change.

3. Ability To Create Hybrid Environment

Azure also offers an option to build hybrid application and create  hybrid environments so that on-premise resources can also be utilized. This helps in reducing the costly workarounds that cloud usage entails. 

4. High-Level Of Customer Support

Azure infrastructure is available in many countries around the world with multiple data center regions and multi-language support.

These multi-fold advantages prove that by keeping Microsoft Azure as your ally, you can definitely benefit your organization with extremely efficient features that will help in reducing potential risks and costs involved, leading to an overall organizational growth and success.

So, if you’re preparing to “Go Cloud”, then Azure is your best possible option!!