If you’re not yet fully on the cloud, then you’re a like a dinosaur just waiting for the Big One to hit. In addition to the benefits it procures for business continuity and disaster recovery, the cloud simply makes things easier – such as collaboration and integrability with other services. Tech giant Microsoft caught on early, and their Azure cloud platform has seen consistently better returns in each of the years since its 2010 launch.
In the following article, you’ll learn more about Azure, and the top 5 reasons why it’s one of the premier cloud services out there, stacking up quite nicely against competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Google at Work and Oracle.
- The Unmatched Popularity of Microsoft Products
Ever since the inception of the Windows operating system, Microsoft has solidified itself as an absolute powerhouse in the tech world. In fact, today over 1.5 billion people employ Windows on their computing devices, and a further 1.2 billion people use some aspect of the Office suite. When you include MS Sharepoint into the mix, then it’s clear that the cross-compatibility of Microsoft’s Azure with all of these commonly-used programs is a decisive bonus in making this your go-to cloud platform. Azure also employs the same virtual machines as Windows and related operating systems.
- Security in an Unsecure World
There is, of course, no such thing as 100% security; but with a robust tech company such as Microsoft, you’ll come as close as feasible with Azure.
There’s a reason that tech companies are rarely hacked when compared to other business; the best and the brightest work directly on their software/ Microsoft’s long line of secure products, from Xbox to Skype videoconferencing, translates to a similar level of trustworthiness with Azure.
- A Multitude of Always-Available Support Avenues
As you would expect, a multi-hundred billion dollar company such as Microsoft would have around-the-clock tech support services. Azure falls right into this; the well over a dozen regions that contain a full data center make the network as reliable as any on earth – and more than most others, in fact. Your cloud accessibility is assured at an availability of 99.95% – guaranteed.
- Multiple Services – IaaS and PaaS
Of the three major cloud computing services available – Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service – Azure hands its users IaaS and PaaS. The former allows you to outsource your cloud computing resources, and the latter lets you hire outside designers to build applications using the Microsoft infrastructure. The alternative would be prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest corporations, as the building and maintenance of infrastructure is very costly. With Azure, you simply lease Microsoft’s own robust platform.
- Analytics
As anyone who’s ever invested anything into search engine optimization would tell you, analytics is (almost) everything. In the cloud computing services sector, this also rings true; Microsoft Azure’s engineers understood this fully when they implemented the ability to manage data services such as SQL and NoSQL. This helps businesses improve their own services by finding bright spots in the data. Specifically, Azure comes with the program HDInsight, which employs the Apache Hadoop-based cluster methodology to dig deeper into data than just about any other cloud-based instrument.