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Microsoft Azure Services

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud the options are almost enough to put you off.

Similar to Amazons’ AWS Hyperscale Cloud environment, Microsofts’ Azure and Office 365 services provide a scalable, pay-as-you-go cloud computing model, to provide users with business grade compute, storage or throughput as and when needed.

What does this mean?

Start Ups – If you are building a business then you almost immediately begin to run your core business applications on a cost effective, scale as you grow basis. You can budget more effectively (as long as you stay in control of the data), without the large initial Capital Expenditure (CapEx) purchases of IT hardware, software and services.

Existing Organisations – can gradually replace their traditional “on premise” infrastructure and the heavy CapEx costs involved, with flexible, scalable on demand IT infrastructure using on the whole Operational Expenditure (OpEx) budgets, consuming services the BIG3, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Like the other Big3 Microsoft provides a wide suite of different tools and solutions for enterprises and software developers that can be used in data centers across the globe. And like Amazon and Google is widely used and trusted by organisations such as government agencies, education establishments, not for profit and private organisations.

Microsoft Azure is a platform of interoperable cloud computing services, including open-source, standards-based technologies and proprietary solutions from Microsoft and other companies. Instead of the traditional way of building an on-premise server installation, or leasing physical servers from traditional data centers, Azure’s billing structure is based largely on resource consumption. Pricing varies between different types of services, storage types, and the physical location from which your Azure instances are hosted.

For example, storage pricing varies based on redundancy and distribution options. In the UK region, hot locally redundant block blob storage (LRS-HOT), with 3 copies in one data center, starts at £0.0147 per GB. Geographically redundant storage (GRS-HOT), with 3 copies in one data center and 3 copies in a second geographically distant data center, starts at £0.0293 per GB. Read-Access GRS (RAGRS-HOT), which allows for read access at the second data center, starts at £0.0366 per GB. (please check for latest pricing)

In addition to data storage, virtual machine, CDN, and Windows-related services, Azure also offers a wide range of other services such as:

    • Azure Kubernetes Services which as we have mentioned on other pages, allows business enterprises to create and manage Kubernetes clusters, including creating, scaling, and upgrading, freeing up developers to focus on their application.
    • Azure Blockchain Services provides businesses the opportunity to build, govern, and expand blockchain networks at scale. It has a preview feature which simplifies the formation, management, and governance of consortium blockchain networks, so you can focus on business logic and app development.
    • Azure Digital Twins is a preview service, and provides the tools necessary to model the relationships between devices, places, and people using virtual representation of a physical environment, known as the spatial intelligence graph.
    • The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite offers various options for connecting and monitoring devices, as well as providing telemetry and analytics services.
    • Azure Redis Cache is a managed version of the widely used open-source Redis data structure server; Azure Cosmos DB is a hosted NoSQL database for specific use cases; and Azure Search is an OData-based managed search service.
    • And Azure Media Services offers cloud-based video playing, indexing, transcoding, and content protection services.

 

As with anything, it’s not always as simple as it sounds, and any IT project takes careful considerations and planning. Our team of Cloud/Dev and TechOps Consultants can help you deconstruct and demystify the options. We will align the right services to your business strategic objectives and support you on your transformation journey.

Somewhere you will likely adopt Cloud services, and probably already do. Hyper Scale Cloud computing is taking off at rapid pace. In fact in a recent publication Gartner Inc. is forecasting 2020 revenue for the public cloud services market of $50 billion, up 24% from 2019’s estimated revenue of $40.3 billion.

For more information on how our Semantic Technology Consultants can help your business on it’s Digital Transformation Journey, or any other Technology advice, contact us today