In many ways, businesses have moved beyond the “either/or” debate of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as evidenced by Microsoft’s fiscal Q3 2017 earnings report, which shows Azure revenue growth of 93 percent year over year. For an increasing number of businesses today, Azure plays an equal or even greater role in the cloud strategy of organizations that are also using AWS.
This is due to the fact that Azure’s cloud capabilities are both deep and broad, which is only bolstered by the fact that so many businesses are already Microsoft-based to one degree or another. Understanding the nature of many of those cloud capabilities is an important step to deciding how Microsoft Azure will play a role in each businesses cloud strategy.
Azure has operations across 19 regions worldwide, with multiple data center regions in the US, Europe, China, Asia, and the Pacific.
Azure Integration spans Microsoft SaaS and PaaS offerings as well as:
These capabilities enhance interoperability and process depth with ERP, CRM, and other business data in a scalable environment to enable greater speed and reliability. Non-Microsoft users benefit from Azure’s BizTalk Services for application integration solutions for SAP, Oracle EBS, and many other technology providers. Azure is also highly compatible with other operating system standards, with Linux-based Android apps being the latest entry.
Business changes and growth can be unpredictable, so Azure’s ability to be infinitely scalable enables bursting capabilities during spikes. Equally important is its ability to scale alongside a business’s applications as a cluster that allocates a web application to a specific set of processes. This means applications do not run on a single server, which ensures never running out of server capacity. In addition, Azure provides auto-scaling capabilities based on load or schedule.
Azure allows the storage of file data, structured data sets, or queries in a reliable and fast environment and shares it across virtual machines (VMs) using the industry-standard SMB 2.1 protocol.
Microsoft Azure HDInsight service brings an Apache Hadoop solution to the cloud, which allows organizations to handle and analyze any amount of data at one time with Excel integration that enables flexible data visualization opportunities.
Azure backs up six copies of a business’s data across two separate Azure data centers for 99.9 percent uptime guarantees. The Microsoft Recovery Services Vault allows automation of the backup process of both cloud and on-premises data.
Azure’s Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle is designed to provide security at all phases from planning to launch and through operation with continuous security-health monitoring that includes:
Keep in mind that this brief overview of Microsoft Azure’s cloud capabilities represents only a portion of what the cloud platform can deliver to organizations. From the smallest business to the largest, these capabilities are constantly being refined and expanded to serve the different and changing needs of users in a constantly changing digital business landscape.