MS Azure, earlier known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform. The platform offers computing, analytics, storage, and networking services. Companies across industries can leverage these services based on their needs and pick the services they need to develop new applications, run the existing infrastructure, or meet their scaling requirements using the public cloud platform.
The key benefits of MS Azure cloud services are that businesses can smartly manage their challenges and attain their organizational goals with precision. Moreover, its capability to work with open-source technologies makes it a promising platform for companies that prefer to have the desired flexibility to work with. The platform offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and also provides serverless functionality.
What makes it a feasible solution for industry-agnostic is that the platform offers a Pay-as-you-Go (PAYG) model that implies that users need to pay only for the resources and services they use in a month. Therefore offering immense flexibility in scaling up or reducing resources based on each month’s requirements.
How MS Azure is Used?
MS Azure’s most popular use cases incorporate running virtual machines or containers in the cloud environment. The compute resources enable organizations to boost their operations by hosting infrastructure components, including Windows Server Services, further divided into three categories: Internet Information Services, networking services focusing on firewalls, and third-party applications, including components such as Domain Name Service (DNS) servers.
The most common usage of MS Azure is for hosting databases in the cloud. What makes it critical for users is that they can choose from serverless relational databases like Azure SQL and non-relational databases that include NoSQL.
The organizations’ additional usage of this platform is for backup and data recovery. They can benefit from this platform with data retention and recovery provisions.
MS Azure: Services
Let’s take a look at the MS Azure products and services that would empower organizations to streamline their operations by making most of their cloud computing resources available.
Compute Services: These services allow users to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs), containers, and batch jobs. Additionally, these services provide support for remote application access. Users can leverage the resources created within the Azure cloud that can be configured with either public IP addresses or private IP addresses, depending on whether the resource needs to be accessible to external networks.
Storage: This service allows organizations to store their structured and unstructured data on the cloud with support for big data projects, archival storage, and persistent storage provisions.
Analytics: This service is comprehensive, offering storage and distributed analytics, big data analytics, real-time analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), data streaming, and data warehousing provisions.
Networking: The service offers a range of features such as virtual networks, dedicated connections, gateways, traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, DNS hosting, and network protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: This vast service allows developers to ingest artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive capabilities into their applications and data sets to gain better outcomes.
DevOps: This service offers a range of project and collaboration tools, including Azure DevOps, which provides support for the implementation of DevOps software development practices. Additionally, it provides features for application diagnostics, integrations with DevOps tools, and test labs for conducting build tests and experimentation.
Internet of Things: These services enable businesses to capture much data in real-time from IoT devices, sensors, and other devices. The MS Azure services cater to offering timely notifications, providing analytics, support in monitoring, and enabling smooth coding and execution.
Conclusion
To sum up, MS Azure is the trusted platform for businesses that need flexibility and expertise to manage their resources smartly on the cloud. If companies intend to utilize their resources more effectively, then relying on different platform services offered by MS Azure can prove to be a great solution. Moreover, SMEs that don’t have expertise or dedicated IT departments can rely on managed cloud services from a reliable and trusted IT partner. It can help them gauge effectively in the competitive market by serving their customers better.
