Microsoft products form the foundation for most company’s basic business processes. Microsoft Azure can be the foundation of your information technology processes. Here’s what you should know.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing product. Cloud computing lets you access computing infrastructure and tools as a service instead of buying your own servers and storage devices. The infrastructure and tools are available on demand, and the cloud provider handles many of the support functions. MS Azure supports both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), giving you virtual machines (VMs), and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides tools for developing, deploying, and running applications in the cloud.

What Services Are Available in Microsoft Azure?

MS Azure offers dozens of services. These include both basic technical infrastructure services such as virtual machines, storage, SQL and NoSQL databases, and Active Directory services, along with many specialized services you can use to build mobile applications, Internet of Things applications, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, big data applications, and other sophisticated software.

What Are the Benefits of Using Microsoft Azure?

Using MS Azure gives you the all the benefits of cloud including easy management, reduced cost, and the ability to scale up easily without buying capacity in advance. MS Azure is highly available, simplifying and streamlining your disaster recovery planning. Azure supports many operating systems and programming tools your team is familiar with but packages them up so it’s quicker and easier for them to develop and deploy applications reliably. Your IT team has more time for focusing on business priorities instead of routine support and maintenance tasks. It’s becomes easy and inexpensive to experiment with new technology.

How Much Does Microsoft Azure Cost?

With MS Azure, you pay just for the capacity and services you use. That cost will depend on the size of your virtual machines and the amount of storage you need. But you’ll save the costs of running your own data center, as cloud eliminates the power and cooling requirements along with eliminating the need for spare capacity and ongoing maintenance contracts. You can enforce policies to keep Azure costs under control, such as using the smallest VMs that will run your workload and shutting down test and development environments that aren’t needed any more.

There are many features in MS Azure, and it can be challenging to figure out how to use it most effectively. Prescient Solutions is a Microsoft Partner, experienced with all Microsoft products including MS Azure. Our experts can advise you on how to use Azure, help you transition to that infrastructure, and provide support once you’ve completed the transition. Contact us to talk about how Azure can replace your data center with lower cost, scalable cloud services that support the future of your business.

Additional Microsoft Azure Resources

Choose Microsoft Azure to Transform Your Business

Finding the Right Fit in Microsoft Azure

Getting the Performance You Need from Microsoft Azure

Azure Stack Brings the Benefits of the Cloud to Your Data Center