Why the Cloud?

Microsoft Azure

It has been said that the on-premise data center has no future. Like mainframes and dial-up modems before them, self-hosted data centers are becoming obsolete, being replaced by increasingly available and affordable cloud solutions. Several important players have emerged in the cloud service sphere, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), perennial computing giant IBM, and Apple’s ubiquitous iCloud, which holds the picture memories and song preferences of hundreds of millions of smartphones users, among other data. With so many options, why are companies like 3M, BMW, and GE moving workloads to Microsoft Azure? Here are some of the reasons.

Flexibility

With Microsoft Azure you can spin up new services and geometrically scale your data storage capabilities on the fly. Compare this to a static data center, which would require new hardware and OS purchasing, provisioning, and deployment before additional power could be brought to bear against your IT challenges.

​This modern flexibility makes Azure a tempting solution for organisations of any size.

Cost

With Microsoft Azure you can spin up new services and geometrically scale your data storage capabilities on the fly. Compare this to a static data center, which would require new hardware and OS purchasing, provisioning, and deployment before additional power could be brought to bear against your IT challenges.

​This modern flexibility makes Azure a tempting solution for organisations of any size.

Applications

With à la carte service offerings like Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Application Insights, and Azure’s scalable, on-demand storage for both frequently accessed and ‘cold’ data, Microsoft makes developing and testing mission-critical apps a snap. Move an application from test to production mode on the fly across a globally distributed network. Microsoft also offers substantial licensing discounts for migrating from their existing apps to Azure, thus representing even more opportunity for savings.

Disaster Recovery

Sometimes the unthinkable becomes the very immediate reality. Another advantage of Microsoft Azure lay in its high-speed and geographically decentralized infrastructure, which creates limitless options for disaster recovery plans. Ensure that your critical application and data can run from redundant sites during recovery periods that last minutes or hours instead of days. Lost time is lost business, and with Azure you can guarantee continuous service delivery even when disaster strikes.

The combination of Microsoft’s vast infrastructure, constant application and services development, and powerful presence in the global IT marketplace has made Microsoft. ​​