What does the word azure remind most people of? Perhaps the ocean, the sky or anything else bright and blue. But ask the same question to business owners and chances are their answer will be Microsoft. Since 2010, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and infrastructure, Azure, has dominated the IT market because of its seamless integration and a highly intuitive infrastructure.

But creating a successful product is only half the battle. Providers must make sure their products continue to remain on top year in and year out. Microsoft strives to ensure this through continuous rollouts of updates and improvements to its already powerful cloud computing suite. To that end, enterprises large and small continue to leverage Azure as their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution of choice.

Is Microsoft Azure right for your business? But what does it offer? Read on to find out.

What is it?

Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of integrated cloud services that include computing, database, analytics, networking, storage and more. It is designed to help organizations build, deploy, and manage applications and services.

Unlike most of the cloud platforms and infrastructures out there, Azure offers a comprehensive hybrid solution by combining Microsoft’s existing PaaS investments with new IaaS features. This results in consistent services integration as well as computing and storage flexibility. But there’s a lot more that makes Microsoft Azure right for your business.

Versatility

Azure offers a myriad of features, all of which are intuitive and designed to help employees work smarter, not harder. Azure’s integrated tools, for instance, offer pre-built templates and managed services that make building and managing mobile, web and Internet of Things (IoT) apps fast and easy. Think apps from the likes of Amazon Echo and Nest Thermostat.

The infrastructure also supports a broad selection of operating systems, programming languages, databases and more. This means you can run Linux containers, build apps with JavaScript or Python and build back-ends for iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Azure works seamlessly with Microsoft cloud services such as Azure Active Directory and Azure SQL Database, too.

Azure’s predictive analytics services -- including Cortana Analytics and Stream Analytics -- use insight to help you make intelligent, strategic business decisions.

High availability

Microsoft offers high availability and redundancy in their data centers with a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.95% for their products, including Azure. This translates to approximately four hours of downtime per year, or an impressive 20 minutes per month.

Robust security

As a tech giant, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft places a lot of emphasis on security. In fact, it was the first cloud service provider behind the U.S. Privacy Shield certified entities and among the first cloud providers recognized by the European Union’s data protection authorities for its commitment to EU privacy laws. This has a lot to do with the fact that Azure is guarded with multi-factor authentication, firewall, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and application password requirements. This multi-level protection detects, assesses, diagnoses, stabilizes and eliminates online threats before they infect your system.

Cost-effective

Azure’s pay-as-you-go pricing allows you to manage your budget without surprises.  You’ll never pay more than you actually use. And because you can launch customer apps and internal apps from one platform, you can save infrastructure costs. This will also reduce hardware and maintenance costs.

Finding a provider who knows the ins and outs of Azure is imperative to make it a worthwhile solution for your company. As a cloud provider with years of experience, SimplyClouds is happy to answer any questions you might have about Microsoft Azure. Even better, we can deploy, customize and maintain Microsoft Azure to meet your unique business needs. Just give us a call and we’ll be happy to advise.