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Microsoft Azure

Why Microsoft Azure is best for SMBs’ digital and IT strategy

Whether it is secure cloud storage for business data or a full-scale digital transformation for your organization, Microsoft Azure’s cloud services offer many benefits to SMBs from reduced cost to improved security and customer experiences.

The entire global business ecosystem underwent a paradigm shift with the pandemic, but small and medium businesses (SMBs) around the world faced the toughest challenge. Rapidly shifting to or building a digital business model and acquiring the requisite technologies in time to keep businesses running added concerns regarding time, costs, and ensuring customer trust through such a transition.

The pandemic has clearly shown us the importance of the need for digital businesses to be technologically equipped to ensure business continuity and access to enterprise systems for their employees. In the present situation, then, cloud computing offers a future-proof, affordable, and scalable foundation for SMBs’ digitization and digitalization initiatives.

What is public cloud?

Public cloud can be explained as a computing and storage environment that does not rely on physical servers or infrastructure, and is delivered over the public web. You can use public cloud services for free or select an on-demand pricing scheme or a time-based subscription. Public cloud services permit customers to pay only according to their usage of the storage, CPU cycles, or the bandwidth they utilize.

To date, public cloud services are the most popular way by which brands and firms use cloud computing. These services allow IT services providers or businesses to access information and manage their cloud accounts using a web browser. Some examples of public cloud are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Google Cloud, etc.

Benefits of public cloud services

Some of the key benefits of leveraging public cloud are –

  • Your cloud service provider will take care of the whole maintenance, and it will not require your extra attention anymore.
  • You pay only for the services you use.
  • It provides you with very high reliability with an extensive network of servers to guarantee against failures.
  • Unlimited virtual scalability of your business systems with on-demand resources you only pay for when you need them.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services – What is it?

Microsoft Azure is an expansive collection of unified cloud services that comprise web services, storage, computing, analytics, networking, mobile, and databases. Azure cloud services enable organizations to grow faster while reducing long-term capital expenditure on building and maintaining an IT infrastructure. Azure’s most popular services are –

  • Virtual Machines
  • Azure SQL Database
  • Azure Active Directory
  • Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
  • App Service
  • Windows Virtual Desktop
  • Machine Learning
  • Azure Cosmos DB
  • Functions
  • Cognitive Services

Every business has different requirements when it comes to resource management, data management, and storage management capabilities. For example, not all enterprises have the need for large storage, but they may need other services like customer service tools, testing systems for web apps, etc. And Azure gives your business exactly what it needs. Thus, before going all out with getting a cloud license and planning the deployment, it is imperative that enterprises define the actual requirements and build a business case for the breadth of cloud services they need.

Why Choose Microsoft Azure For Your SMB’s IT Strategy?

There are numerous cloud computing services available in the market. But Azure continues to preside over the cloud market because of its features and seamless interoperability with the Microsoft suite and other solutions.

Azure provides 200 products and cloud services, arming SMBs’ with a wide range of tools to build a strong, future-ready digital business infrastructure. Here are the top reasons to choose Microsoft Azure for your small your medium-sized business’s IT strategy –

Security

Digitization has led to a rise in cybercrime and fraudulent activities, which creates further impediments to SMBs’ growth. All Azure data centers are well-protected by measures that include two-factor authentication, efficient access card readers, and biometric systems. This helps in securing your company’s confidential and sensitive data on the cloud through effective recovery methods. It is compatible with the latest cybersecurity tools for user privacy and data integrity. Azure provides multi-layered security to safeguard your business information from any malware or cyber-attacks.

Scalability

Scalability refers to the cloud infrastructure’s ability to tackle incremental rise in workloads, both expected and unexpected. This can be achieved deploying resources manually to manage the performance of the cloud systems or they can automated to ensure round-the-clock connectivity and security.

The degree of scalability offered by different cloud service providers is the most important consideration when choosing the right solution for your business. Microsoft Azure can aid your business’s growth while protecting your data and systems against uncertainties that come with digital transformation. Microsoft Azure cloud enhance your cloud network’s computing and data storage capabilities to tackle any unforeseen surge in traffic and ensure smooth functioning. Azure infrastructure also adapts perfectly with your business to allow you to scale up or down your service agreement to prevent the usage of heavy-load applications and incurring huge costs.

Lower redundancy

Any SMB must ensure that business systems are up and running at all times and keep downtime at the lowest for their services. For this, they require 24×7 support for their systems, which Azure offers to help customers to resolve any issue, at any time.

Affordable licensing options

Azure has a consumption-based pricing structure, which allows companies to control their IT budgets as they pay only for those cloud features necessary for the business at that particular stage. Azure offers its customers a pay-as-you-go option and a pre-purchased “Reserved Instance” for a certain number of years. In the Reserved Instance, customers can commit to a certain period to use a specific set of functions for a pre-determined price that is usually lower than what they would pay in a pay-as-you-go model.

No on-premise data center or hardware

On-premise data storage facilities and equipment are costly and can be a huge burden on your company’s budget. They also have to be replaced after a specific time when they cannot meet your business requirements.

Having a strong cloud computing platform like Azure for storing your business’s data, applications, and workflows will eliminate any need for on-premise hardware. Adopting cloud computing will open the door to many improvements in workload management and business efficiency.

Latest compliance mechanisms

Compliance always has a significant role to play when it comes to choosing your cloud computing services. Azure gives the maximum compliance coverage with significant number of certifications as compared to other cloud computing services. With Microsoft products such as Azure and others, enterprises get access to a robust compliance system and support ecosystem for cloud success. This helps ensure they are up to date with regulatory and operational requirements.

The bottom line

Azure offers several built-in tools to orchestrate, monitor, and optimize both internal processes and workflows as well as customer-facing systems. It also offers tools to analyze operational processes such as sales, marketing, customer touchpoints, and more using real-time analytics to further optimize them for better outcomes. Further, Azure offers an extensive range of analytics capabilities including predictive analytics to help businesses make more intelligent and future-proof decisions. It is no wonder then that Microsoft Azure has opened up a completely new realm of possibilities for SMBs to pivot and grow as digital enterprises.

If you are looking to shift to cloud from on-premise IT infrastructure or build a hybrid IT environment with cloud, Microsoft Azure is the right choice. Our experts support you from requirement gathering, planning the implementation, to the actual hosting and configuration of the cloud, ensuring necessary integrations, user adoption, and ultimately, the long-term process of managing organizational change as you roll out the cloud deployment for the entire company.

Contact us now to discuss your requirements.

 

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