Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud computing platform that helps us build, deploy, and manage applications through a global network of data centres. With Azure, we can handle big data, storage, virtual machines, and much more. This platform is flexible and scalable, making it useful for individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises alike.

Azure offers many services that are easy to use, even for beginners. We can start with just a few clicks and explore a wide range of tools that cater to different needs. Whether we want to host a website, store files, or run complex data analytics, Azure provides the resources we need. By using Azure, we can save time and money while accessing top-notch technology.

Understanding Microsoft Azure: An Overview

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform created by Microsoft. It’s designed to help us manage a wide range of cloud services, including computing, storage, and networking. Azure is versatile, allowing us to quickly scale resources up or down based on our needs. This makes it ideal for a variety of tasks, from simple website hosting to complex data analysis.

Azure is also known for its global presence. With data centres located around the world, we can deploy our applications in multiple regions. This ensures low latency and high performance for users, no matter where they are. Plus, Azure integrates well with other Microsoft products, providing a seamless experience for those already using tools like Office 365 or Windows Server.

Security is another strong point of Microsoft Azure. It offers advanced security features, such as threat detection and multi-factor authentication, to keep our data safe. We can also rely on Azure for compliance with industry standards, making it a trustworthy choice for businesses of all sizes.

Key Services and Features of Microsoft Azure

Azure offers a wide range of services and features that cater to different needs. Here are some of the key ones:

1. Compute Services: These include virtual machines, app services, and batch processing. We can use virtual machines to run custom software or apps, while app services allow us to create and deploy web apps quickly. Batch processing helps us handle large volumes of data by distributing tasks across multiple resources.
2. Storage Solutions: Azure provides various storage options like Blob storage, File storage, and Disk storage. Blob storage is great for saving large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. File storage is useful for shared file systems, and Disk storage offers high-performance storage for virtual machines.

3. Networking Services: These services ensure our applications can communicate efficiently. Azure’s virtual networks, load balancers, and Azure DNS help optimise network performance. Virtual networks allow us to connect cloud resources to on-premises networks, while load balancers distribute incoming traffic to multiple servers to maintain high availability.
4. Database Services: Azure supports different types of databases, including SQL Database and Cosmos DB. SQL Database lets us run relational databases in the cloud, and Cosmos DB offers a globally distributed database service with high availability and low latency.
5. AI and Machine Learning: Azure makes it easy to integrate AI and machine learning into our applications. Services like Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Services help us build, train, and deploy AI models. These tools can enhance our apps with capabilities like image recognition, language understanding, and predictive analytics.

6. Developer Tools: Azure supports a variety of development tools and frameworks. We can use Visual Studio, GitHub, and Azure DevOps to build, test, and deploy our applications. These tools streamline the development process and facilitate team collaboration.

By understanding these key services and features, we can make the most of Microsoft Azure for our projects.

Setting Up and Configuring Your Azure Account

Creating an Azure account is simple and straightforward. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Sign Up for an Account: Visit the Microsoft Azure website and click on “Start Free” or “Create Account”. You will need a Microsoft account to proceed. If you do not have one, you can create it during the sign-up process.
2. Choose a Subscription: After signing in, select a subscription plan. Azure offers a free tier that includes a certain amount of free services each month, making it easy to try out different features without any cost.
3. Enter Billing Information: You will be asked to provide billing information, even if you are using the free tier. This is required for verification purposes. Don’t worry, you won’t be charged unless you exceed the free limits.
4. Verify Your Identity: Microsoft may ask for a phone number to send a verification code. Enter the code to confirm your identity.
5. Explore the Azure Portal: Once your account is set up, you can access the Azure portal. This is the central hub for managing all your Azure services and resources. Spend some time familiarising yourself with the portal’s layout and features.
6. Deploy Your First Resource: Start by deploying a simple resource like a virtual machine or a web app. The portal provides step-by-step guidance to help you through the process.

By following these steps, you can set up and configure your Azure account quickly and efficiently.

Practical Tips for Optimising Azure Usage

Making the most out of Azure requires some smart practices. Here are practical tips to help optimise your Azure usage:

 

1. Monitor Performance: Use Azure Monitor to track the performance of your resources. This tool provides insights into our applications and infrastructure, helping us identify and resolve issues quickly.

2. Set Up Alerts: Configure alerts to notify you of any unusual activity or usage spikes. This ensures we can act promptly to mitigate potential problems, such as unexpected costs or performance bottlenecks.
3. Implement Cost Management: Use Azure Cost Management tools to monitor and control expenses. Set budgets and analyse spending patterns to ensure we stay within our financial limits.
4. Use Autoscaling: Enable autoscaling for applications that experience varying loads. Autoscaling automatically adjusts the number of resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance without overspending.
5. Optimise Storage: Regularly review and optimise storage solutions. Use features like hot and cool storage tiers to balance performance and cost based on our data access needs.
6. Leverage Backups: Regularly back up critical data using Azure Backup. This protects our information from accidental deletion, corruption, or other disruptions.
7. Security Best Practices: Follow security best practices, such as enabling multi-factor authentication, using secure network connections, and regularly updating resources to the latest security patches.
8. Regular Training: Keep our team informed about new Azure features and best practices. Continuous learning ensures we make the most out of the platform’s evolving capabilities.

By implementing these tips, we can optimise our use of Azure, improving performance and cost-efficiency.

Microsoft Azure is a robust cloud platform that offers many tools and services to help us manage and deploy applications effectively. Whether we are new to cloud computing or seasoned professionals, Azure provides a flexible and comprehensive environment to meet our needs. From setting up an account to deploying resources and optimising usage, Azure simplifies cloud management with its user-friendly interface and powerful features.

Taking advantage of Azure’s capabilities can transform how we operate, making our processes more efficient and scalable. With the right practices, we can leverage Azure to its full potential, ensuring our projects run smoothly and cost-effectively.

To learn more about how Microsoft Azure solutions can benefit your business and to get expert guidance, contact egforit Software Services today. Let’s make your cloud journey smooth and successful.

Azure Integration Services is a set of application integration services within the wider Microsoft Azure offering. Hosted purely in the cloud, Azure iPaaS consists of four core elements:

• Logic Apps: creates workflows and business processes between services in the cloud and on-premises
• Service Bus: connects on-premises and cloud-based apps and services for secure messaging workflows
• API Management: publishes APIs securely for internal and external developers to use when connecting to back-end systems
• Event Grid: connects Azure and third-party services with a managed event-routing service, for event-based app development

These four are not packaged together, giving you the freedom to pick the components required for your particular use cases.

You can use Azure to connect virtually any cloud or on-premises applications, Microsoft or not. But naturally, Microsoft has made it easy to connect Azure iPaaS to other services within the Microsoft Azure platform. And organisations with a strong technical investment in Microsoft software often prefer the relative familiarity of Azure.

Azure Logic Apps connectors are available for Microsoft software such as Power BI, Outlook, SharePoint, and SQL Server, as well as for Salesforce, SAP, IBM, and Oracle.

You can also benefit from connectors for industry-standard business-to-business (B2B) formats such as XML, EDIFACT, and AS2. The FTP and File System connectors provide access to files and folders online and on-premises. When connecting less common applications, you have the ability to create custom connectors within Azure.

While the core services above only deal with application integration, Azure also provides data integration capabilities. This is required if your application needs to store unstructured data, for example, or include custom code for specialised data transformations.

To achieve these, you simply connect the Azure iPaaS to a service such as Azure Data Lake Store or Azure Functions. To work with unstructured big data in a traditional extract, transform, load (ETL) process, you should use Azure Data Factory.

Below are a few of the benefits our clients have seen from Azure-based integration solutions.

• Consumption-based pricing: With Azure, you pay for only what you use. If you have an Office 365 connector that’s triggered when a file is modified, for example, you only pay for when that trigger occurs. This makes it easy to start with a small budget and ramp up as your business needs expand.
• Test for free: Because you only pay for live consumption, your developers can build and test integrations in Azure without paying a penny.
• Little coding required: Azure services are low-code, meaning you create integrations with a drag-and-drop interface. This speeds up development and mitigates the need for lengthy testing.
• Maintenance included: Microsoft takes care of all the computing infrastructure, such as scalability and virtual machines. It would be much more expensive to retain your own IT maintenance team.
• Professional security: Microsoft has a team of 3,500 cyber security experts protecting Azure from global threats, so your integrations are in safe hands.
• Environmental transparency: Those with environmental targets can use Microsoft Sustainability Calculator to calculate the impact of Azure services.

Given the over 300 connectors available, virtually any integration is achievable with Azure iPaaS. Our digital integration team has used Azure to connect systems such as SAP, Excel, Power BI, SQL Server, and Oracle HCM Cloud. A few of the business solutions we’ve achieved with Azure include:

• providing field workers with up-to-date stock inventory information
• enabling customers around the world to track their orders online
• unifying disparate HR, payroll, and pensions data into a single HR platform
• automating the transfer of warranty claims data into a central ERP

For a detailed understanding of what we can achieve with Azure integration, read our Tullis Russell Azure integration case study.

Boomi is one of the most highly-popular iPaaS, having been a leader in Gartner’s Enterprise iPaaS Magic Quadrant for many years. Boomi is an all-in-one integration platform consisting of five capabilities:

• integrating applications and data across the cloud and on-premises
• synchronising and enriching trusted data with master data management
• designing, securing, and scaling APIs with API management
• providing secure integration with partners through B2B/EDI management
• automating workflows and developing applications with low-code tools

Your level of access to these components depends on your chosen Boomi edition (Professional, Professional Plus, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus).

Boomi offers two types of connector: application connectors, which connect to specific software, and technology connectors, which use standard data formats and drivers.

All in all, there are over 100 standard application connectors for Microsoft, SAP, Amazon, Oracle, Google, Salesforce, Workday, Sage, Jira, Quickbooks, and more. Combined with the technology connectors, it’s possible to connect almost any cloud or on-premises data and applications with Boomi.

Below are a few reasons why Boomi is the platform of choice for many of our clients.

• High customer satisfaction: Boomi has long been considered an iPaaS leader, and has a customer renewal rate of 97 percent.
• Established community: With over 10,000 customers globally, Boomi’s platform provides intelligent recommendations crowd-sourced from its large development community.
• Connection-based pricing: You only pay for the initial licence and the number of unique connections deployed. There is no additional charge for the number of application or technology connectors used in each connection.
• Flexible billing: Boomi users can choose between monthly or annual billing, to suit their financial preferences.
• Low-code development: An intuitive interface, with pre-made templates for the most common scenarios, allows you to create integrations in a fraction of the usual time.
• Frequent updates: Boomi updates its iPaaS with the latest features on a monthly basis, freeing up your IT team to focus on delivery.

Boomi’s connectors provide near-total flexibility for application and data integration. On top of the branded connectors, Boomi successfully connects to hundreds more applications via its standards-based technology connectors.

In our position as a Boomi Advanced Partner, we have achieved the following solutions with Boomi:

• eliminating manual data entry between sales, finance, and education software
• connecting a global payment platform with legacy databases through API-led connectivity
• integrating 22 disparate applications and databases for a national delivery company
• enabling targeted marketing by linking a travel booking system to a marketing platform

To learn more about what Boomi can achieve, take a look at our Boomi case study.

It’s no secret that cloud computing is the driving force behind business evolution, allowing businesses access to unprecedented flexibility, and efficiency. As companies seek to capitalise on the benefits of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure has emerged as a key player, helping businesses integrate on-prem infrastructure with the cloud.

But if you’re still considering making the change, let’s take a minute to go over the benefits of on-prem integration with Azure.

It’s scalable

Azure enables seamless vertical and horizontal scaling, letting your business adjust to resources based on demand. By integrating on-prem with Azure, you tap into a virtually limitless pool of resources, ensuring your applications and services can effortlessly handle surges in usage without compromising performance or user experience.

Enhanced operational efficiency

Azure’s comprehensive suite of management tools automates many operational tasks, reducing manual effort and the risk of human error. By integrating with Azure, you streamline processes, eliminate time-consuming manual configurations, and optimise resource utilisation. This efficiency translates to quicker deployment of applications, reduced downtime, and a more agile response to market demands.

Turn the pennies into pounds

Traditional on-prem infrastructure often comes with significant upfront investments in hardware and maintenance. Azure’s Pay-as-you-go model eliminates the need for such capital expenditures. By integrating, you leverage a cost effective approach where you only pay for what you use, leading to cost savings and access to top of the range technology.

Eco-tech

Cloud computing isn’t just good for business, it’s good for the planet too. By optimising your resource usage, you can reduce energy consumption compared to traditional data centers. By integrating on-prem with Azure you can truly align your business’s commitment to sustainability.

From scalability and operational efficiency to cost optimisation and enhanced security, the cloud-powered synergy can revolutionise how businesses operate and innovate. By embarking on this integration journey, you’re equipping your organisation to thrive in a dynamic digital landscape while unlocking new horizons of success.

Microsoft Azure grants businesses the power of cloud technology and replaces the traditional on-premises infrastructure that companies were reliant upon many years ago. Fast forward to today, we see AI quickly gaining momentum in the digital world as a powerful solution to many of today’s digital challenges. Entering the fray, Microsoft has invested in AI to bring innovative features to their solutions; a popular example being Bing’s new AI-powered capabilities thanks to ChatGPT. Azure’s AI features have also been extensively augmented thanks to AI advancements.

By implementing such AI features, we will see more efficient ways of working and collaborating. We explore a few of the options that Azure AI can help businesses make smarter decisions faster.

Azure Bot Service

With Azure Bot Service, users are able to manage, create, and launch chatbots with ease thanks to the extensive features that are available. Thankfully, Azure chatbots are available with out-of-the-box functionalities to get users started. Chatbots are particularly useful as answering client queries, presenting information from CRM and other data sources, translating, offering personalised recommendations, and moderating content.

AI-powered chatbots reduce the load on support departments by removing the reliance on telephone helplines and can improve the customer experience with quick problem solving and information gathering. When Azure Chatbots are connected with Azure Cognitive Services, it will benefit from natural language and conversational language understanding, image analysis, and more.

Azure Machine Learning Service

Customers looking to build their own machine learning solutions can use the Azure Machine Learning Service which enables them to create, teach, launch, and manage their own ML models. It can also be used as a base upon which to build to get faster results. As an end-to-end ML solution, users can manage and track models following deployment, achieve the best solution with several runs, and analyse predictions in real-time.

Azure ML Service is automated which means it identifies the best algorithms and configures hyperparameters with speed, thereby raising productivity and lowering costs through autoscaling. This also means that its accessible to smaller companies that want to start with machine learning without having a dedicated data science team. It is fully compatible with container services like Azure Container Instances, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Docker, making it easy to transport your ML solution.

Azure Machine Learning Studio

Azure Machine Learning Studio offers a simpler visual platform in which is create machine learning solutions. With an emphasis on drag-and-drop features, there are no coding requirements to get started. IT is also browser-based, so users can build upon an idea using Azure’s preconfigured algorithms and data modules.

With collaboration features built into ML Studio, teams can work together to build, test, and deploy their new ML solution. Despite offering a user-friendly interface, ML Studio offers the same powerful tools as ML Service. As long as the preconfigured algorithms are fit for your model, ML Studio is the perfect tool to get started.

More often than not, when it comes to choosing a cloud platform software for your business, it tends to be a toss up between AWS or Azure. The two platforms have changed the way we look at cloud computing, but both have benefits that make them great in their own right.

So what are they? What are the pros and cons of each system? Today, we’ll be conducting a cloud computing showdown: AWS vs Azure.

Key differences between AWS and Azure

Customers of AWS on the EC2 network have the ability to configure their VMS or pre-configured images, whereas Azure users must sect a virtual hard disc to construct a VM that has been pre-configured by a third party.

AWS provides temporary storage that is assigned when an instance is launched and destroyed when it is terminated. In parallel to this, Azure provides temporary storage via block storage with page blobs for VMS and block bobs for object storage.

What is Azure?

The Azure Cloud Platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life and solve some of your biggest business challenges to create a better future.

Build, run, and manage applications across multiple cloud systems, on-prem, and at the edge with the tools and frameworks of your choosing.

Pros of using Azure

Scalability

Azure offers the flexibility to scale resources up or down based on demand. You can easily increase or decrease computing power, storage, and other resources as needed.

Broad range of services

Azure provides a wide array of services, including VM, databases, AI, and machine learning tools, analytics and more. Azure also offers a comprehensive ecosystem for building and deploying a range of applications.

Hybrid capabilities

Azure supports hybrid cloud deployment, allowing you to seamlessly integrate on-premise infrastructure with the cloud. This enables organisations to make use of existing investments whilst capitalising off cloud computing benefits.

Security and compliance

Azure has some of the robust security measures protecting your data, applications, and infrastructure. It’s not only been put to the test several times, but it gives businesses peace of mind when it comes to security compliance.

Microsoft Integration Opportunities

If your organisation already uses Microsoft tools and technologies, Azure integrates smoothly with them. This makes it easier to manage and automate workflows and leverage existing skills and knowledge.

Cons of Azure

Complexity

Azure is a vast platform with numerous services and features, which can make it difficult to navigate and configure. There is a learning curve to understanding it properly, especially if you’re not familiar with cloud computing.

Cost management

While Azure offers cost-effective options, managing costs can be challenging if resources are not carefully monitored and optimised. Organisations (especially mid-sized enterprises) need to closely track resource usage to avoid unnecessary expense.

Technical support

While Azure provides technical support, the quality and responsiveness may vary. Resolving complex issues may require advanced expertise or engagement with a third party support service.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centres globally. Millions of customers – from the fastest growing start-ups to leading government agencies – use AWS for lower costs, becoming more agile, and innovating with immense speeds.

Pros of AWS

Flexibility

One of the greatest advantages of AWS is its ability to scale resources on-demand. Whether you need to increase or decrease your computing power, storage, or bandwidth, AWS allows you to do so effortlessly. This scalability ensures that your infrastructure aligns with your business needs, enabling you to respond quickly to fluctuations in demand and optimise costs.

Reliability

AWS boasts a robust and highly reliable infrastructure, designed to deliver exceptional uptime and minimise disruptions. With a global network of data centres, AWS ensure redundancy and fault tolerance, reducing the risk of downtime and ensuring business continuity.

Security and compliance

AWS places a strong emphasis on security, offering a range of tools and services to protect your data and applications. With advanced encryption, access controls, and monitoring mechanisms, it provides a secure environment for your critical assets. Additionally, it maintains compliance with various industry standards and regulations, easing the burden of meeting compliance requirements.

Cons of AWS

Complex learning curve

While AWS offers a wealth of services, navigating through its vast ecosystem can be complex and overwhelming, especially for those new to cloud computing. Adopting it may require dedicated training and expertise to maximize its potential and avoid costly mistakes.

Cost management

While AWS provides cost optimisation tools, managing expenses can be challenging, particularly as your usage scales. Without proper monitoring and control, costs can quickly escalate. It’s crucial to develop a comprehensive cost management strategy and continually optimise your resource allocation to avoid unexpected bills.

Vendor lock-in

Moving your infrastructure and applications to AWS may create a dependency on their ecosystem. Transferring to another cloud provider or bringing certain services in-house could be difficult and time-consuming. It’s essential to evaluate the long-term implications of vendor lock-in and plan accordingly to mitigate any potential risks.

And the winner is…?

When it comes to tech, the tides are always changing. Back in 2015, nobody would have fathomed that Azure could catch up with AWS. But fast-forward five years, and it already dominated a quarter of the market, even more now in 2023.

As the rate of digital transformation continues to quicken, both tools will continue to innovate and update, so perhaps the better question is, which do you think comes out on top? Azure or AWS?

Azure DevOps is a cloud based software development life cycle management service provided by Microsoft. Since its release, it has become one of the most popular project management tools. Today, software developers use Azure DevOps to manage, build, deploy, and test their applications.

The service promotes collaboration among teams and defines the process to unify developers, project managers, and contributors to develop software. Compared to traditional software development approaches, Azure DevOps allows for speedier and more efficient ways of working.

Azure DevOps services can be augmented with a variety of tools. For developers that work with Java, Node or Microsoft .NET, or those that work in Jenkins, Ansible, or Puppet, Azure DevOps can work together with these in tandem. It offers collaboration tools such as customisable team dashboards with custom widgets to display information, trends, and progress. There is also an option to create documentation via wikis to pull information together in a central location.

Azure DevOps supports adding extensions and can integrate with other services including Trello, Slack, Campfire, UserVoice, and more. Developing your own custom extensions is also possible. Azure DevOps also offers the following features:

Azure Boards

Azure Boards offers a range of tools that helps teams keep track of development features in Agile process. The tools include Kanban boards, backlogs, sprints, queries, and plans. Users can generate reports, track issues, and add code defects.

Azure Repos

Source code version control important for any software project to keep track of different versions and changes in the code. Azure Repos provides version control tools hosted in Azure cloud and includes free unlimited private Git repos.

Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines provides build and release services for software development teams. It supports building, testing, and deploying Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS apps. It can also run in parallel on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It supports containers and Kubernetes to ensure teams can easily build and push images to container registries like Docker Hub and Azure Container Registry.

Azure Test Plans

Azure Test Plans are used for testing software and for QA teams to create test cases, test and report results, and generate reports. It also has options for manual testing and continuous testing.

Azure Artifacts

Azure Artifacts is a tool that lets teams share packages such as Maven, npm, NuGet, and others, from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into CI/CD pipelines.

Azure Pricing Calculator shows total cost of an intended workload on Azure, granting the ability to anticipate costs. Azure cost analysis shows how much each workload will cost as they are running within Azure. It also predicts future costs based on current configurations.

Azure budgets will alert Azure users when spending thresholds have been met. Finally, Azure Advisor helps to provide cost optimisation recommendations by identifying idle and underutilised resources. It provides easy ways to implement actions to reduce spend.

Azure payment options

Azure offers different VM payments depending on the client’s requirements.

On-demand/Pay-as-you-go: This allows clients to launch VMs instantly, which means this is the most expensive option. However, it does offer flexibility and convenience as companies can run instances without interruption.

Spot: This is an interesting option as it allows organisations to buy spare Azure compute capacity for much cheaper than On-demand. Savings can be up to 90% but the thing to note is that Microsoft can terminate a Spot instance depending on capacity demands. This option is best for workloads that don’t require constant running.

Reserved: VM instances can be reserve for one or three-year periods. This means savings of up to 72% compared to On-demand pricing.

A gap in a US military server operated by Microsoft left more than a terabyte of data exposed to the internet. This comes only one month after Microsoft 365 was awarded higher level government security accreditations.

The openly accessible server was part of an internal mailbox system hosted on Azure’s Government cloud and used by the Department of Defence (DoD) various reasons, including the processing of security clearance paperwork.

The exposed public-facing server was discovered at the end of February and wasn’t password protected, allowing whoever had its IP address and a browser to access the data freely.

Bloomberg spoke to individuals at the DoD and Microsoft; the Pentagons cyber command and Microsoft are investigating the incident. The server was reportedly accessible to the internet since February 8th before being secured and removed from public access. So far in the investigation, there’s no sign malicious parties have accessed the data, DoD revealed.

The blame game

The Pentagon and Microsoft have blamed each other for the security risk. But there’s a good chance the fault lies within the government for misconfiguring its IT environment, not Microsoft.

Further demonstrating the need for organisations and businesses to properly protect their data through various means. Microsoft’s solutions are indeed secure, but organisations have the responsibility to set up their internal systems properly.

DoD Data Audit

An requirements published (PDF linked) in early February found that every branch needed to improve to evaluate commercial cloud service offerings properly.

The audit report goes on to claim that authorising officials “did not review all required documentation to consider the risks to their systems”, nor did they consider system risks that were identified in supporting documentation, as all five authorising officials believed the government acquisition processes were sufficient to mitigate risk to their respective systems.

The government has contracts with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Microsoft for its cloud programme. The IG report said it examined five cloud systems from three authorised companies as part of the review. The latest Microsoft system to get approval – Office 365 Government Secret Cloud – is cleared for operation at impact level 6, the highest classification level allowed in the commercial cloud. In comparison, other vendor systems approved for DoD cloud use only reach IL5.

With the DoD and Microsoft now apparently trying to blame each other for an egregious security failure, the window is open for those other three to swoop in and further disrupt the Redmond/DC relationship.

A cautionary tale of cyber security

Cyberattacks and ransomware attacks are on the rise, with a 42% rise in the first part of 2022 (Compared to the previous year). But all too often, security tools are siloed or not designed to meet the needs of today’s businesses. The result is an overworked IT team, unaddressed alerts, undetected threats, and ignored updates. As the threat landscape evolves, protecting your digital business data requires an agile approach that empowers you to protect your data.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform offering many cloud services. This includes computing, analytics, storage, and networking. A major advantage for end users is the ability to use any service to develop new applications or run existing applications in the public cloud.

With migration and networking tools, single sign on, and identity management, hybrid storage devices can be deployed on-prem. A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment made up of one or more public and private clouds. Data, apps, and workloads are shared across the clouds as a unified system. This allows clients to scale workloads into the public cloud when private cloud resources are exceeded. Azure enables scalability and flexibility of public cloud systems while maintaining the security of business critical data and applications.

Read on as we take a look at the Azure hybrid cloud benefits.

Features of a hybrid cloud

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform offering many cloud services. This includes computing, analytics, storage, and networking. A major advantage for end users is the ability to use any service to develop or scale new applications.

There are even tools to migrate apps to your public clouds. With the Azure Hybrid Benefit program, you can transfer existing licenses for SQL Server and Windows Server.

Additionally, you can run apps across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. These apps are either run as they are, or they can be refactored to run with cloud scalability and portability features. Azure provides advanced analytics and automated migration options for ease of use.

By using Azure in your systems, you’ll be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s expansive global network, and be able to utilise 100 Gbps connections with Azure ExpressRoute. Plus, you can connect thousands of users and endpoints with Azure Virtual WAN. Azure Firewall and DDoS Protection services come as standard to ensure secure connection management.

As an Azure customer, you’ll also have access to the high-performance resources that Microsoft offers, including enterprise-grade security and availability. With Single Sign-On (SSO) across on-prem, cloud, and mobile apps, you can centralise identity management and promote standardised access.

Organisations are increasingly having to adapt to changing technological, economic and industry challenges. Modern businesses focus on reducing business costs and complexity, as well as increased agility and innovation.

Modernising workloads by moving them to the cloud is a significant digital transformation and one that provides security and flexibility. In addition, cloud infrastructure and capabilities allow companies to work efficiently and provide the best service to their customers. Microsoft surveyed 1200 IT decision makers to reveal several key cloud adoption trends.

Cloud adoption planning

More than half (62 percent) of companies have a migration and modernisation strategy that they are following. Their key priorities are reducing business costs, future-proofing business strategy, and driving revenue up.

Subsequently, Microsoft expects ROI considerations to be the main driving factor behind cloud initiatives for implementation – either optimising existing cloud workloads or migrating additional workloads.

It’s expected that companies will be looking to move over to the cloud in the near future. Of the surveyed companies, those with more than half of their workloads in the cloud will rise from 27 percent to 47 percent over the next 18 months. Microsoft also saw that organisations with a cloud migration and modernisation strategy are 58 percent more likely to be ‘cloud-only’ three years from now.

Modernisation is key to digital transformation

Migrating to the cloud is a stepping stone towards digital transformation, 82 percent of companies agreed. Modernisation involves changing existing applications and workloads to take advantage of cloud-native technologies. Based on the survey, 74 percent of migrated workloads are already candidates for modernisation, which would speed up the product innovation cycle and personalise end-user experiences.

Hybrid and multi-cloud interoperability and integration

As companies embrace multi-cloud plans, cross-cloud management and interoperability is highly valued from their cloud provider. Companies enjoy the investment flexibility and cloud capabilities as 71 percent continue implementing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy.

With challenges such as multi-cloud integration, legacy backend integration and refactoring existing applications, support from a dedicated migration/modernisation team ranked highest on customer wish lists. Post-migration support, access to engineering resources, and help with technical training were also highly valued.