1. Cost Savings
Most of the firms nowadays are trying to cut their cost and Microsoft Azure is one of the easiest and smartest way to get started. No matter whether the company is a startup or established, you can always achieve smart cost savings by using Microsoft Azure. Buying new servers and supporting software licenses could really cost your company a lot and hence the Azure cloud stack offers an effective way to save money.
It’s not that Azure won’t cost you anything but your business needs to effectively manage your virtual environment and make sure they don’t run unnecessarily. This is the one thing that needs to be kept in mind regardless of the cloud platform you are moving.
2. Elastic Hosting (Pay for What you Use)
Azure offers IaaS, PaaS or SaaS options, which allows any organization to outsource its cloud infrastructure and only pay for what we use. With the availability of granular range of options, you can really control the cost with Microsoft Azure.
3. Security and Reliability
The Microsoft Cloud is actively monitored and protected by Microsoft with sophisticated tools and services. Azure boasts a lot of security credentials and certifications and the operations centre in Azure always maintains that there is an active threat. They continuously monitor and protect the whole infrastructure.
4. Hybrid Environments
Microsoft Azure, provides all kinds of benefits over a more traditional data center approach. However you don’t have to go all in to the cloud if you don’t want to. Azure has good support to setup hybrid scenarios which will allow you to offload some of the workloads to Azure while getting the most ROI from your existing infrastructure investments.
5. Rapid Application Development/Testing
Rapid Application Development is usually delayed at the beginning of the project when new equipment, development environments, etc. needs to be approved, ordered, setup and made operational in big organizations. Azure provides the ability to quickly setup and allows teams to get going early with their project. It also has a specific offering called Dev Test Labs which can be very helpful to your development teams.
6. Speed
Speed of deployment, operation, scalability and functionality of Azure can’t be matched by an on-premises solution or even a lot of other cloud providers. Network speeds are dependent on your internet connection however it does have options to have express routes setup for super fast connectivity.
7. Scalable
As many a times, the growth of your business is quite uncertain and it is important for your IT platforms to grow as your business does. Azure provides the perfect platform for you to build applications for a specific set of processes. Since the applications are distributed in the cloud, they won’t run out of server capacity.
Moreover, it gives more flexibility and ability to customize applications in terms of performance.
8. Simplified and Evolving Management
Though the Azure has been there in the market since 2010, yet the services it offers keeps on evolving keeping in pace with the needs of the consumers. It has evolved from the management point of view and the IT professionals now have a much more advanced API to use in the form of Azure Resource Manager (ARM).
9. Support / Workload Ability
Microsoft has listed 600 Azure services including computer, mobile, storage, data management, messaging, media, CDN, Developer, Management and Machine Learning. From small projects to the giant ones, Azure can handle everything. It also provides 24/7 tech support and round-the-clock service health monitoring. Also, it has flexibility of languages to support the regions of their data centers across the globe.
10. Advanced Solutions & Huge Possibilities
Development of SaaS products such as Machine Learning, Stream Analytics and Power BI for better insight into data from scratch requires a lot of time and effort. Azure speeds up the pace of work by analyzing data in comparatively lesser time (few hours rather than few days) and helps in making better business decisions.