Today, large companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which have extensive experience running large data centers, are offering customers to “rent” data capacity. This is great news for companies that want to focus on their core business application and not worry about the underlying platform. Microsoft’s cloud platform offering is called Windows Azure.

Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s premier cloud platform, has contributed significant revenue growth for Microsoft since its launch in 2010, coinciding with the company’s continued transition to the cloud market by forming strategic partnerships with leading in the cloud like Salesforce.com. Azure not only has strong platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities, but the solution is currently the only major cloud platform that is a leader in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as ranked by Gartner. Forbes recently predicted that Azure’s annual revenue would be close to $2.3 billion.

Azure is gaining ground as the cloud infrastructure of choice for many IT professionals. Here are some of the reasons these professionals are turning to Azure as their cloud platform of choice, and perhaps why your organization should consider doing so, too:

Cost savings and rapid scalability

With a model like Windows Azure, companies only have to pay for the resources that their applications use. If a company needs to increase its number of users or its data storage, for example, Microsoft can simply adjust its rate, making it extremely convenient and scalable. With this “pay as you go” approach, businesses only pay for the amount of space they need, rather than having to pay for empty storage at the maximum amount they may never use.

reliability

In addition to cost savings and rapid scalability, another benefit of Windows Azure and the IaaS/PaaS model is reliability. Windows Azure services are provided from cloud data centers that have multiple built-in redundancies. If one server fails, a company’s applications will automatically run on another server in the data center.

easy upgrades

Microsoft Azure supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including specific Microsoft and third-party software and systems. New web applications and updates can be easily added.

Tightly integrated with other Microsoft tools

For organizations that rely on Microsoft tools like SharePoint (which was recently ranked the #1 platform for business collaboration), Office 365, and Outlook, it makes sense to invest in a cloud platform that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft products. Organizations can also use the same virtual machines in Azure that they use on-premises, such as Windows and Linux, further simplifying operations. Many industry insiders expect Azure to slowly but surely gain adoption due to this ability to offer users a seamless and fully integrated suite of services.

IaaS and PaaS

Azure has an attractive mix of IaaS (managed) and PaaS (unmanaged) services. IaaS allows companies to outsource their cloud computing infrastructure and pay only for what they use. PaaS allows companies to create their own web applications and/or software without having to purchase or maintain the underlying infrastructure. This allows organizations to customize their cloud software, like Office 365 for example, to meet their exact specifications and requirements. Because Azure is an industry leader in both categories, businesses can more quickly and easily build, deploy, and manage applications.

Strong BI and analytics support

Azure provides managed SQL and NoSQL data services and built-in support to drill down into data and discover key insights to improve business processes and decision making. Specifically, organizations can leverage their SQL Server in the cloud and can use HDInsight, Microsoft Azure’s Apache Hadoop-based cloud service, to build Hadoop clusters to analyze data more deeply.

Azure has a fully integrated delivery pipeline

Once you start comparing the benefits of Azure from a business perspective, you realize that there are many elements beyond just storage.

From an architecture perspective, you really need a unified delivery pipeline – here’s Azure:

• control source
• unit exam
• Integration testing
• Delivery
• Go to live tools

While it can be argued that assigning specific workloads to different environments can sometimes be advantageous. There is great continuity and the risk of integration failure is reduced when all tools are available under one umbrella.

It means that in the case of product updates or any other changes, Azure can guarantee [to a high degree] that your pipeline is designed accordingly, which creates a compelling business case.

Disaster recovery in Azure

Because data moves globally, it’s important for providers to have built-in failover and disaster recovery capabilities. They have regional and global failover options, hot and cold standby models, as well as rolling restart capabilities that work out of the box. These capabilities put them far beyond the plain old storage option. While this may not be an everyday issue for a business, it is definitely something you can confidently know is happening in the background.

Let us know which business benefit of Microsoft Azure was the most interesting below. If you want more information or need help, please contact us.