Azure Cloud Services

Your business runs on data. It’s how you make competitive decisions and evaluate and analyze customer trends. You can’t afford to lose it or allow it to fall into the wrong hands. Whether it’s hackers stealing personal customer information or competitors trying to see what you are up to, your data must be stored safely both internally and externally. With Azure Blob storage, you get guaranteed durability and geo-replication of your data. Additionally, with encryption, role-based, and policy-based access control, you can provide very fine-grained permissions to specific parties, i.e., employees and partners. Cost-effectively store petabytes of information and say goodbye to vaults full of tape backups. Azure also lets you create data lakes, giving you the ability to perform big data analysis on huge quantities of information to discover new insights from the data you already have.

Moore’s “Law” states that computing power doubles about every two years. With both manufacturing process improvements and support for multi-core CPUs, manufacturers have pretty much been able to keep pace with this prediction. For businesses, staying up-to-date with technology is challenging as computers effectively become obsolete long before the hardware gives out. With the advent of virtual computing services, however, you can get out of the hardware arms race and leave that headache to Azure. Launch exactly the size of virtual machine (VM) you need now and then replace it with a bigger one when the need arises. The VM can be focused on memory-intensive applications, CPU, or a blend of both. And you can set up much smaller and more affordable VMs for simpler functions that don’t require the latest and greatest. Azure lets you pick exactly what you need.

Azure Cloud Services allow you to precisely match your hardware usage with your business needs. Enable the free Autoscale feature for your APIs and web apps to configure performance goals and scaling limits - automatically scale up and down to support fluctuating spikes in traffic. This customization serves your business goals while minimizing your costs. Azure Load Balancer is a tool that can shift the load dynamically between your fixed assets, optimizing performance for your customers. Azure CDN allows you to push media files to globally distributed servers, putting your content as close to your end-users as possible, which minimizes the download time for them.

The Azure services page lists dozens of services that businesses can choose from. Some are just specialized setups of other general services, while others are truly unique offerings. Hosting, monitoring, storage, pipelines, identity management, blockchain, even IoT (Internet of Things), Microsoft has packed Azure full of products that modern-day businesses need to succeed. These tools are well-documented, built to integrate with and build on each other, and come backed by Microsoft’s long history of supporting their customers. Your business can build for success in the cloud, knowing that Microsoft has blazed the trail and built the suite of tools you need to conquer all your business challenges.