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Posted 28th June 2023
Even with the best planning, disasters can and do strike. Being able to recover quickly and fully when it does strike is what’s going to ensure your business survives. Azure has this covered, offering robust high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to ensure your business remains resilient in the face of connectivity outages or cyberattack. Features like Azure regions and availability zones, site recovery and backup options provide redundancy, data replication and automated recovery options, which keep downtime to a bare minimum and ensure your applications and data are always available. Azure gives you confidence in your business continuity and recovery plan, without the need to buy costly secondary infrastructure.
Cyber security is a major concern for businesses, particularly when it comes to sending and storing data to the public cloud. Microsoft Azure combats this with extensive security measures to protect your systems, data and applications, ensuring secure and seamless logon for users, whether businesses or individuals. Passwords are a notorious security weak spot for businesses, especially when there are lots of users with high data privileges, and Azure’s Single Sign On helps mitigate this. Further advanced security features like threat intelligence and encryption help safeguard your business from potential threats and breaches, and the whole environment is built to adhere to the strictest industry standards around compliance. GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA and more are all covered.
Speed is of critical important for businesses using cloud services – when you’re transferring big files or large volumes of data, you need to be able to trust it will get there quickly, without being interrupted and potentially corrupted. Azure’s ExpressRoute creates private connections between Azure data centres and infrastructure either on your premises or in a colocation environment to deliver faster speeds and consistent low latency. ExpressRoute connections don’t go over the public internet either, so they are more secure and more reliable than typical Internet connections.
Azure provides brilliant hybrid capabilities that allow your business to seamlessly integrate your on-premises infrastructure with the cloud. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure that allows you to run Azure services and applications locally to ensure a consistent and seamless experience across environments. It also means your business can use Azure to develop, test, feedback and retry applications, empowering you to explore new ideas and technologies before pushing them live across the environment. Azure brings the power, agility and fast-paced innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment, balancing flexibility with control for a truly consistent hybrid deployment.
Azure offers unparalleled scalability and flexibility, allowing you to easily scale your resources up or down according to spikes and falls in demand. Simply put, if your business needs more resources, you buy it. There’s no need for restructuring your infrastructure, either – Azure has everything set up, and provides the additional infrastructure and tools you need to scale your applications and services seamlessly. Whether you need to handle sudden changes in traffic or accommodate growth over time, Azure’s scalability helps you to reduce redundancy and over-provisioning, and ensures you’re only paying for what you use.
Microsoft Azure has data centres running in locations across the globe. This means your business gets fast and seamless low-latency access to your data and applications from anywhere in the world. This global presence also empowers your business with a global reach, enabling you to serve a broader customer base and provide excellent user experiences across different geographical regions.
Azure provides a developer-friendly environment that means your business can keep innovating. It offers extensive support for various programming languages, frameworks and tools, and integrates with everything from the Internet of Things (IoT) to Excel. It also offers integration with popular development tools like Visual Studio and GitHub, to give your developers truly free rein in their favoured tools.
Azure offers much more than additional storage for your business. The Azure ecosystem boasts a vast portfolio of services (Microsoft lists more than 600) covering everything from compute and networking to storage and identity, so whatever programs and applications your business uses day-to-day can be managed via the platform. This comprehensive range of services has seen Azure named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services for the past few years, based on the completeness of the vision and ability to execute. These additional services mean you can build, deploy and manage applications with ease, and leverage the extensive Azure ecosystem to meet your business needs and drive innovation.
One of the primary benefits of cloud migration for businesses these days is the ability to harness the expanding power and capabilities of AI and machine learning, and these are areas where Azure excels. Microsoft offers a wide range of AI and ML services in the Azure ecosystem that empower you to build intelligent applications to support, enhance and automate a range of processes. With services like Cognitive Search, Bot Service, Machine Learning, Applied AI, Video Indexer, Content Moderator, Speaker Recognition and more, you can leverage the latest technology advances to gain valuable insights, streamline processes and deliver personalised experiences to users and customers alike.
Azure supports you to make better, more-informed business decisions with its powerful data analytics and insights capabilities. Through services like Synapse Analytics, Databricks and Power BI, Azure enables even small businesses to process, visualise and analyse large amounts of data, on their own terms. In the age of Big Data, Azure empowers you to make data-driven decisions to achieve your business goals.
If you’re looking to move wholly to the cloud or to empower your business with a hybrid infrastructure, BCN can help. We’re a Microsoft Partner and can support you with everything from designing and building your Azure environment and migrating your workloads to setting up your on-premises infrastructure for optimum performance and security.
Get in touch with us today.
