Cloud computing big players such as Amazon web services(AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google cloud and IBM cloud, offer highly cost effective alternatives to traditional on premises hosting environments. Both AWS and Azure are top performers with equivalence in majority of use cases. But Azure is making a lot of headlines in the cloud storage recently.
Azure is a cloud computing service by Microsoft built for creating, testing and deploying and managing applications through a worldwide network. .It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (Iaas) capabilities. Azure is a preferred solution for businesses looking to stay ahead of competition.
Microsoft Azure has many advantages which can provide business benefits associated with cloud services. MS azure is becoming more popular primarily due to 8 key factors.
Compared to many other cloud service providers, Azure provides high availability as it's data centers are located in all parts of the world(operates in 19 regions). With Azure high availability is built-in, since redundant network links, power supplies and hardware are included with Azure.
Azure has a built-in auto scale feature which allows applications to perform best according to the demands of application usage. Scaling is system’s ability to adapt according to the change in amount of workload or traffic, that is, increasing or decreasing the resources for application. With scheduled auto scale, businesses can respond before anything ever happens. They can use auto scaling to scale down all of virtual machines at night or on the weekend when nobody is around and then have them ready to go Monday morning when you come in to work. as compared to traditional hosting, configuring scaling is easier in Azure. However,you should keep a check on metrics and performance of your application for the best out of Azure. This would help to save money as well as optimize the performance of the applications.
Azure is a leader in Laas security; it follows the standard security model of Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Stabilize and close. Its multiple level of protection for allows Azure to achieve multiple compliance certifications than any other cloud provider. The data stored in compliance with the regulation is helpful for the legal or the financial sector. The data centers have 2 tier authentication, thereby reducing hacking to a great extent.
The main reason why MS azure platform is growing more popular is its reduced price factor. Its cloud environment allows both customer and internal applications in the clouds, thus saving IT infrastructure costs and also it's pay as you-go pricing allows to manage IT budgets by paying only for what they need.
Azure brings a fully integrated development environment. It allows developing, testing, and deploying cloud apps. Application can be quickly deployed to the Azure platform. They run on Visual studio, the world's leading development environment. It helps for greater business continuity and better integration of data and workflows. It also enables opportunities to create the best DevOps environment.
Backing up data on Azure cloud comes with ease. All the data in cloud is backed up automatically on another secure server within MS network. Site recovery is a native disaster recovery as a service (DRaas) and MS Azure has been recognized as a leader in DRaas based on its abilities to execute disaster recovery as a service. Azure site recovery offers ease of deployment, cost effectiveness and dependability.
Azure supports technologies like AI, data analytics, IoT, mixed reality , blockchain, kubernetes to keep you stay ahead in the business world. Its brings Apache hadoop solution to the cloud which can analyze huge amount of data at a time. There are options to integrate it with excel and BI which helps you visualize your data to provide insights into transforming your business. It enables easy deployment of 1000+ supported IoT devices. Also, Azure is the only cloud service that support end-to- end experiences of mixed reality.
MS Azure downplays AWS and rest of its competitors in the matter of .Net compatibility. It is much easier for migrating .net applications to Azure cloud. Azure App Service is well suited for all ASP.NET websites and most WCF services. Azure has been optimized to work with both old and new applications developed using the .Net programming framework. Hence businesses that use .Net based applications are going with Azure, a safe and easier choice.