Moving your data and processes to the cloud was once seen as a ‘fad’—a quick and easy move for budding start-ups but seen as a potential security risk for large enterprises. However, judging by the steam that Microsoft Azure is building and the lengths the tech giant has gone to relay security fears, companies still only considering a cloud migration are at risk of falling behind their competitors. The cloud is no longer a ‘nice to have’; it’s now a necessity for organisations of all sizes.
In the cloud infrastructure space, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the two clear front-runners. Unlike AWS, though, Azure offers more comprehensive compliance coverage and was the first major cloud provider to commit to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
So, for businesses still conscious of the security risks of operating a cloud, but can understand the importance of cloud migration, Microsoft Azure is the solution you’ve been searching for.
Microsoft Azure benefits
Microsoft Azure is exclusively powered by Microsoft’s global network of 100+ data centres, giving you a cloud platform with the highest level of security, lightning speed and unwavering agility. You’ll avoid complex infrastructure teams, frustrating performance issues and you can wave goodbye to tedious planning meetings with unscalable data servers.
Here are the five biggest Microsoft Azure benefits:
1. The cloud that grows with you
Perfect for rapidly expanding enterprises, Microsoft Azure is 100% scalable, able to adapt to the constant evolution of modern businesses. You can scale your cloud capacity on demand, broadening or narrowing computer management to suit your needs—be that tens, hundreds or thousands of virtual machines and devices—all in a fully managed platform. So, you’ll never have to worry about restricting cloud storage options when it comes to storing your documents and company data.
2. Better business agility
Azure is an intelligent solution designed for long-term business agility. If your business changes direction (as all innovative companies inevitably do) Microsoft Azure instantly responds by giving you the freedom to build and deploy wherever tools you need, using tools, applications, and frameworks of your choice – offering 68 unique services in total. Meaning your development teams can focus on helping the business instead of getting bogged down in infrastructure maintenance.
3. Supreme disaster recovery
Monitored 24/7, Azure includes the invaluable Site Recovery service and Backup service, ensuring business continuity and letting you replicate and recover virtual machines.
Site Recovery service: will keep your business apps and workloads running during outages by replicating workloads running on physical and virtual machines, from a primary site to a secondary location. This means staff will still have access to their apps and workflows during an unforeseen system failure, preventing a stoppage in productivity.
Backup service: Your sensitive data is backed up on Azure’s resilient cloud, meaning you won’t need to worry about replication intercepting your app data because Azure has a replication frequency as low as 30 seconds. So, business can still run as usual, with no interruption to staff – allowing for a more productive and resilient workforce.
4. Azure Security Centre
Even a minor data leakage can blunt your competitive edge, while a widescale data breach can seriously hurt the financial and reputational state of organisations. This is why Azure is trusted by 90% of Fortune 500 companies. Azure’s inbuilt security centre manages security policies, ensuring compliance across all your hybrid cloud workloads, helping your workforce ensure information is shared, accessed, and stored correctly.
Azure Security Centre will auto-detect security vulnerabilities, prioritise critical threats, and even offer security recommendations so that in the event of data breach you have as much time as possible to mitigate the risk.
5. Azure Compliance Manager
Azure’s Failure Compliance Manager is intelligently designed to assess Azure users in the public cloud. It does this by scanning your onsite information to detect and classify personal data relevant to the GDPR. You can view your very own risk assessment in the dashboard via a Compliance Score feature. You can even specify groups for any standard or regulation, ensuring a business unit in Asia is just as compliant with its native regulations as your base unit in Europe—a worthwhile addition considering the GDPR is based on the individual, not the data processor.
With this in mind, Azure ensures you are 100% data compliant – without the expense of employing a data protection officer.
Your bonus Microsoft Azure benefit: Centrality
Within the realm of cloud solutions, the choices can be overwhelming and the last thing you want is a generic one-size-fits-all solution. When buying directly from Azure, this is often the case, as it’s natural to simply ship your existing infrastructure directly into the cloud.
But with a little expertise, you can not only create a secure and successful cloud environment, but you can cut off the ‘dead weight’ that might have been slowing your business down (even if you didn’t realise it).
At Centrality, we meet with clients to understand their business, so we know exactly which areas of their business should make the jump to the cloud. You can work with a team of dedicated Centrality experts to plan, design and implement your personalised IT infrastructure from the ground up, with flawless migration and 24/7 monitoring post-migration.
Find out more about our expert Azure service here. To learn more about how we can assist your IT strategy, please get in touch with us today.