Introduction
If there’s one concept that IT departments have been toying with over the last few years, it’s whether to begin migrating to the cloud. Many organisations and IT functions have moved past IF and are now deciding WHEN. The choice to migrate to the cloud, to reform a backbone of IT strategy, business continuity, and digital workplace plans are in flight within most organizations. There are myriad reasons to move over to the cloud, including reduced costs, increased flexibility, ease of management and the sheer power it can give even small organisations to produce game-changing solutions and exceptional digital workplaces.
From SMEs needing simple environments through to enterprises with large server farms, the benefits of migration to Microsoft Azure span the whole business spectrum. In this article, we want to highlight the top benefits we have seen as Azure consultants. Microsoft Azure is a powerful tool, with a wide range of features for management, security controls, networking and storage. Microsoft Azure provides Infrastructure as a Service. This means that you access and manage your infrastructure through the Cloud. You no longer make investments in buying and managing physical servers, racks and building space.
Enterprise Benefits of Azure
1) Cost
Investing in new infrastructure is always a large investment of capital expenditure. With Azure this is no longer an issue. Instead of replacing your servers every five years you essentially rent your server from Microsoft for a smaller monthly cost making it an operating expenditure like Office 365.
Servers can be temperamental beasts at the best of times. They require constant care and maintenance and need to be kept in a secure, climate-controlled room with a dedicated staff on hand to ensure everything is running smoothly and to take care of system updates when required.
Depending on the size of your servers, it can also add significantly to your electricity and building maintenance costs
2) Scalability
One of the great things about Microsoft Azure is that it is scalable, and you only pay for what you need. The flexible nature of the cloud means that it’s incredibly simple to scale up. Rather than investing in reserve, backup, or surge capacity physical on-prem infrastructure, you simply reconfigure your application allocation and the increase in capacity is allocated.
The scalability of Azure is an obvious area of strength. Both a small organisation with fewer than 50 people and a global mega-corporation with a six or even seven-figure workforce can scale-up and scale-down very quickly with the Azure platform. This scalability also ensures IT teams can plan and tightly control their migration with confidence.
3) Security and Compliance
The primary thing often holding businesses back from potentially investing in the cloud it’s the perceived security risk it poses. However, Azure data centres are not only equipped with some of the most effective digital security measures on the planet but are physically secure from the elements too, with backup power generators and (in some cases) support workers operating on-site in case they are required.
In addition, Azure also offers the choice to store copies of your data at multiple data centres, so even on the very rare chance that one data centre fails, your business will still be able to run at 100%. Microsoft makes every effort to ensure that the data in its Cloud is protected. Azure is built around the privacy and security demands of business needs.
Microsoft provides the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings compared with any other Cloud service provider. If you work in sectors like legal and finance, you can be confident that your data is being stored compliant with regulations.
Conclusion
Cloud-based infrastructure is in the roadmap for many organizations. If you’re interested in starting your journey to the Azure cloud, then contact us and let’s discuss your business needs.
