Azure Benefits: 3 Business Benefits of Azure Cloud Support & Services

It’s a name that’s making a lot of headlines in the cloud storage and business worlds: Microsoft Azure. Azure was named the leader in Gartner’s Public Cloud Storage Services for the second consecutive year - for good reason. Designed for the modern business, the flexible cloud platform empowers businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications by leveraging Microsoft’s global data center network. This flexibility provides businesses with Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities. Microsoft Azure cloud services are easily integrated with existing IT environments, providing the power and scalability of a hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.

Here Are the Top 3 Business Benefits of Azure Cloud Services:

1. Integrative Application Services

Azure allows companies to easily launch customer and internal apps in the cloud. The cloud environment supports quick deployment of applications, saving on infrastructure costs and reducing the hardware and maintenance burdens on in-house IT. The pay-as-you-go pricing and scalable structure allow SMBs to better manage their IT budgets by only paying for what they need. Hosted applications give businesses a competitive edge by allowing them to deploy customer applications in the cloud. Azure also lets organizations customize their SharePoint servers in the cloud via virtual machines running on Azure. Businesses can migrate their own internal SQL Server databases to a virtual machine through Azure or move their customer’s SQL databases to the cloud – which provides mobile and off-site access to important business data for secure reliable content delivery.

2. Dynamic Computing Power

Azure’s flexible computing power gives businesses on-demand enterprise-level computing power. Virtual machines can be deployed in minutes providing additional processing power and storage. Azure also allows businesses to host websites on a secure cloud server that is managed by Microsoft and backed by their uptime guarantee, providing companies and their customers with reliable web hosting services. Moving these items to the cloud also gives companies a competitive advantage by making data, files, and entire machines that were traditionally hosted on-site available over the cloud both off-site and on mobile devices.

3. Benefits of Azure Storage

The longer a company is in business, the more digital information they accumulate. Over time, data is accessed less and less and eventually given archive status. To accommodate this archived data, businesses can purchase hardware or they can opt for cloud storage. Azure’s Blob storage is a service that allows businesses to store large amounts of unstructured data (i.e. text or binary data) and allows users to access that data from anywhere in the world through an active internet connection. To learn more about Azure, please watch the following video.

Azure's storage allows employees to seamlessly stream archived video and audio. They can easily store files for distributed access, and save images and documents directly to a browser. Azure storage provides secure backup and disaster recovery and can store data for analysis by an on-premise or Azure-hosted service. To learn more about the benefits of Azure, or to understand all the pros and cons of Microsoft Azure, reach out for a free consultation.