10 Reasons to Choose Microsoft Azure for Your Business

The global pandemic has totally reconstructed the working model, making ‘Work from home’ the new norm. Thanks to cloud technology, many organizations can securely run their business virtually. Microsoft Azure is among the leading public cloud platforms for building, testing, deploying, and managing cloud-based applications on globally spread data centers.

It offers a myriad of computing services such as storage, networking, servers, security, software, databases, and intelligence. Typically, the cloud infrastructure is divided into three major categories:

•    PaaS: Platform (as a service)
•    IaaS: Infrastructure (as a service)
•    SaaS: Software (as a service)

Global statistics indicate that 90% of Fortune 500 enterprises are utilizing Microsoft Azure to run their businesses. By using highly integrated Azure cloud solutions, companies can quickly build, deploy, and manage various applications with much ease. Besides, Azure supports multiple programming languages, operating systems, frameworks, devices, and databases, enabling businesses to leverage tools and technologies they trust.

Here are the top 10 reasons to choose Microsoft Azure for your enterprise:

1: High Availability

Microsoft Azure’s high availability of up to 99.99% enables you to always maintain business continuity under any situation. It is a vital feature for mission-critical systems. In case certain components fail, the platform allows your computing infrastructure to continue working. Azure tools and services such as Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, and Azure High Availability zones are responsible for the high availability.

2: Easy Scalability

With the demand for cloud infrastructure growing rapidly over time, it’s essential to have a platform that you can scale up to adapt to any workload with ease. Microsoft Azure delivers the right cloud services such as storage, computing, and networking without any interruption to manage the increased workload. With Azure, you can easily scale up, scale down (Vertical scaling), scale in, and scale-out (Horizontal scaling) resources depending on the business requirement. With Microsoft Azure Autoscaling, scaling is done automatically based on client demand.

3: Global Reach

Microsoft Azure offers a broad range of cloud services with data centers spread globally. Currently, Azure has more than 60 regions worldwide and is available in 140 countries. Typically, each Azure Region is made up of 2 to 3 data centers, allowing your enterprise to deploy apps in whichever region you want. One key benefit of Microsoft Azure is that it ensures high security by providing options to replicate your data across data centers or regions.

4: Security Offerings

Microsoft Azure has been designed on Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), the industry’s leading security process for cloud computing. It entails security at its core, keeping private data and services safe and secure on Azure Cloud. Azure offers excellent compliance coverage of over 50 and is the most trusted cloud platform by government institutions. It’s also the first cloud platform to embrace the international standard for cloud privacy, ISO 27018. As a result, Microsoft guarantees the best safety offering for all data and operations on the Azure Cloud.

5: Unmatched Hybrid Capabilities

Microsoft Azure has hybrid capabilities to facilitate seamless mobility and a reliable platform between the public Cloud and on-premise servers. Azure typically provides a wider range of hybrid connections such as virtual private networks (VPNs), content delivery networks (CDNs), ExpressRoute connections, and caches to enhance usability and performance.

6: Integrated Environment with Multiple Microsoft Tools

Organizations dependent on other Microsoft tools like Office 365, SharePoint, and Outlook want to invest in a cloud platform that easily integrates with Microsoft products. Using Microsoft Azure simplifies operations by running on the same virtual on-premise machines such as Windows and Linux.

Besides, you can develop amalgamated applications for on-premises applications like cloud databases with Azure. Microsoft Azure also aids Internet protocols and open standards like XML, SOAP, HTTP, and REST. There is even a software development kit for PHP, Java, and Ruby for applications written in these languages and Azure tools for Eclipse.

7: Agility

The tech market is changing rapidly, and any organization that rapidly adapts to the changes can cost-effectively drive business growth. With Microsoft Azure, you can rapidly develop, test, and launch different software applications. Instead of maintaining expensive cloud resources, you can leverage the Azure platform and entirely focus on developing, monitoring, and analyzing your software applications.

8: Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery allows you to secure your data even during IT outages or natural disasters. Azure Disaster recovery service allows you to achieve up to 47% more savings than regular on-premises solutions and 337% ROI over 5 years. Microsoft Azure rolled out Enterprise-scale disaster recovery to run in a high availability environment over IaaS.

In the case of service interruption or accidental corruption or deletion of data, you can recover your services quickly and in an orchestrated way. The Azure disaster recovery and backup system is simple to architect, resilient, cloud-native, and highly available. It gives you total peace of mind knowing that you can restore your operations whenever things go south.

9: Fault Tolerance

Fault tolerance is the system’s ability to maintain operational continuity without interruptions even when certain components fail. It simply means guaranteeing zero downtime. Microsoft Azure’s high availability and fault tolerance are very similar features that ensure reliability. The Microsoft team is responsible for maintaining and continuously monitoring the globally spread data centers. The faults are detected much quickly and corrected apace.

10: Analytics and Intelligence Capabilities

Microsoft Azure facilitates SQL and NoSQL data services plus built-in support for digging deeper into user data and uncovering essential insights for enhancing business processes and decision making. In fact, Azure is the only cloud platform that supports Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), Bots, and Machine Learning.

Wrapping Up

With the sheer speed that Microsoft is introducing new components in Azure, it’s apparent that the platform has scored higher in the marketplace than other public cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. Trusted Microsoft partners such as MicroXpress are helping companies build scalable and secure cloud-native systems by taking full advantage of the Azure platform. Since 1989, MicroXpress has been providing professional IT services to businesses throughout Central PA. Contact us today to learn how your business can benefit from the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.