Cloud based technology has revolutionised the way people do business. Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud-based service. With over two hundred products and services under its umbrella, it allows businesses to pick and choose what they require, tailoring their IT solutions to meet their requirements.
Microsoft Azure offerings range anywhere from databases to virtual desktops to machine learning applications and quantum computing. The administration of Azure can also be managed remotely, including the organisation’s active directory, where your user permissions are stored.
Microsoft Azure allows businesses to set up a virtual cloud infrastructure that can be managed and accessed from anywhere around the world. Its flexibility and cost savings with features like Azure Cost Management, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and Azure Reserved Instances is why many organisations have made the switch to Microsoft Azure.
Let’s take a closer look at how Microsoft Azure can save you money.
A reduction in hardware purchases
Microsoft Azure reduces the need to purchase and maintain physical hardware. Firstly, there is no need to buy and maintain a physical server, unless there is a plan to keep some of the organisation’s IT infrastructure on premises. With Azure’s virtual cloud server, a business rents space on a Microsoft server and the servers run as virtual machines.
Just as there is a virtual server with Azure, there is also the virtual desktop. The standard build you would expect for all employee PCs is no longer necessary as the organisation’s IT platform and network can be accessed with any computer anywhere around the world, through a browser. If any changes need to be made to employee desktops, they can be done remotely by administrators. There is no need to send a physical machine off to be repaired. Reducing the need for physical machines means that employers can offer employees Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs.
The speed of the physical employee PC or of the server is no longer relevant when using Azure so there’s no need to spend money upgrading hardware. Microsoft prides itself on the speed of its servers. Also, when users log into the company network via Azure, they access the speed of the Azure network, so the speed of their physical computer is less of a factor.
Pay for what you use promotes growth
If a business is only very busy during Christmas, why does it need to build an IT infrastructure that supports this load if it only takes place a few weeks a year? It is a waste of resources.
What’s great about Azure is because your IT infrastructure is virtual, it’s easy to scale up and down and to pay for the services you use, or the network resources you consume. Easy auto scaling promotes business growth. Before cloud-based options like Azure, businesses had to allocate expensive resources to plan growth and implement it which may have led to them missing out on potential opportunities and revenue.
Azure also offers various billing and budging tools which help companies to analyse their costs. Azure Advisor provides recommendations on how to optimise usage to decrease costs.
Avoid costly disruptions in backup and recovery and cybercrime
A malicious attack can be very costly for a business. Microsoft is at the forefront of cybercrime. It’s in Microsoft’s best interests to keep their servers secure. This is why they spend more than a billion dollars a year implementing the best cyber security. Using Azure means your organisation has access to this security which can help reduce internal IT costs as there is no need to invest in protecting an on-prem server.
Azure offers tools to help companies tackle cybercrime with Azure Security Centre, Azure Web Application Firewall and Azure DDoS Protection. They provide recommendations including turning on multi-factor authentication and verifying identity on every access with a zero-trust security framework.
Microsoft is responsible for the maintenance and security of their servers, and if one fails, they can very quickly allocate Azure resources to one of their many servers located all around the world. If you only have one server on-prem and it crashes that can spell disaster for your business. With Azure the risk of downtime is severely reduced.
In 2019 the independent research firm GigaOm found that when it comes to throughput performance between SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and SQL Server on AWS EC2, Azure is the clear winner for mission-critical workloads, up to 3.4 times faster and up to 87 percent less expensive. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery allows for easy data and application backup to the cloud and quick recovery should anything go wrong.
Get more done faster with a more efficient workforce
One of the main benefits of Azure cloud services is its ability to allow for the administration of a company’s IT infrastructure remotely via the Azure Portal. This can be anything from user management in active directory right through to very complex cloud deployments. There is no need for IT staff to be on-premises.
Cloud-based IT infrastructure allows for a more flexible and efficient hybrid workforce. This is especially appealing in this new pandemic world where things can change very fast. To be able to have employees work anywhere while at the same time have them able to meet virtually in one space to get their work done and to collaborate in that virtual space makes for a highly robust organisation. This means the company isn’t losing money trying to keep up in this changing world because their entire infrastructure is available virtually. While the world may have its interruptions, this will stay constant.
Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud-based service that can really elevate a business’s performance. Talk to the experts at Linktech Australia to find out more.