Mar 29, 2016

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud based solution offering Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each of these comes with different set of services. As a business, you should evaluate the different offerings and select the best option for your organisation.

Microsoft Azure provides on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measure services. You can provision services according to requirement, and it requires minimal infrastructure configuration by the consumer.

Microsoft Azure offers many advantages. The core ones are as follows:

• Microsoft Azure offers a managed datacenter. Microsoft is responsible for managing the cloud infrastructure. This obviates the need for you to manage your own IT infrastructure
• Microsoft Azure offers low operational costs. Cloud computing provides pooled resources, elasticity, and virtualisation technology. These factors help you to alleviate issues such as low system use, inconsistent availability, and high operational costs. It is important to remember that with cloud computing, you only pay for the services that you use.
• Microsoft Azure offers server consolidation. You can collocate many workloads on a single virtualisation host.
• Better flexibility. With products like SCCM 2012 you can increase flexibility and speed.

With Microsoft Azure, you can implement, public, private and hybrid clouds. Public clouds are infrastructure, platform, or application services that a cloud service provider delivers for access and consumption by multiple organisations. Private clouds are designed for a single organisation’s use and hybrid cloud binds two separate clouds together.

Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of services. A few important ones are summarised below:

• Microsoft Azure provides a platform that can host web applications and web services.
• Using Microsoft Azure, you can build virtual machine instances from scratch, or by using templates.
• Azure includes a SQL Database offering which enables customers to build applications by using most development frameworks.
• Microsoft Azure HDInsight is the Hadoop-based solution from Microsoft which is used to process and analyse big data.
• Microsoft Azure allows you to build mobile phone apps for Windows apps, Android apps, and Apple iOS apps.
• You can back up directly to Azure. You can configure the cloud backups from the backup tools in Windows Server 2012 R2, or from System Center 2012 R2.
• Microsoft Azure Virtual Network (Virtual Network) helps you to create a logically isolated section in Microsoft Azure, and then connect it securely either to your on-premises datacenter or to a single client machine, by using an IPsec connection