Microsoft Azure is a powerful tool that more and more companies have begun to embrace in today’s technology-based world. It is a cloud computing service that offers many features and applications for businesses beyond simple data management. Read on to learn more about the most important features of Microsoft Azure.
Management Services
Microsoft Azure comes with various management and automation services that can simplify many of the manual and repetitive cloud tasks you regularly perform. Many of these tasks are incredibly monotonous and can take up valuable time from your IT professionals when they could be doing better things with their time and talent. These tasks are also highly error-prone, as one incorrect entry could lead to more significant issues down the line.
Azure’s automation services do wonders for streamlining the day-to-day operations of a company, allowing your developers to focus better on more complicated IT business processes. In addition to automation, Microsoft Azure also provides developers with various software tools that they can use to construct and manage runbooks to orchestrate and automate these processes.
DevOps
One of the most significant features of Microsoft Azure is the DevOps services that it offers. These services can break down the development barrier between IT operations teams so your business can create more cohesive products faster, at a lower cost, and of much higher quality. You must build, test, and deploy any upgrades or fixes for any application your business develops. Every company faces these challenges, but you can simplify these processes with DevOps services.
With a DevOps development model, your different teams can work together on an application’s entire lifecycle. For example, engineers can work together to develop an application, test it, deploy it, and fix bugs that arise. In addition to integrating these teams along with quality assurance and security teams, different tooling and stack technology can automate more monotonous tasks. By doing this, your team can better focus on more specialized parts of the application process.
With DevOps, your team is overall much faster. As a result, innovating for customers is much simpler; you can adapt to changing markets and business scaling more quickly and grow more efficiently. With an integrated DevOps team, you can create and improve products much faster while also responding to customers’ various needs. This rapid delivery of applications is just one of the many benefits that Microsoft Azure can bring to your business.
Single-Pane Operations
An exciting feature that Microsoft Azure offers is single-pane operations. The Operation Management Suite (OMS) is a Management-as-a-Service (MaaS) that allows you to take a single-pane look at your hybrid environments. In addition, OMS contains a log analytics solution that connects your network’s various data sources, whether virtual machines, storage, network services, logs, or insights.
Hybrid infrastructures also come with new standards for security, and OMS meets these standards with various security solutions and automation challenges. The security solutions that come with OMS also illuminate how interconnected different resources are within your network infrastructure, like threat intelligence, patch levels, and malware infections.
Computational Services
Microsoft Azure also offers various computational services. Both IaaS and PaaS features are available for your business to use. For example, multiple PaaS features allow developers to publish aspects of their websites and manage them easily. These staging environments enable developers to partially deploy applications and auto-swap them into development, seeing any bugs or issues without immediately publishing them. By doing this, they can identify problems and fix them without damaging the site’s functionality or the user’s experience with the site.
Capacity Management
In addition to helping with the functionality and development of applications, Azure also has many features that solve the storage issues many growing companies deal with. As businesses grow, running low on space is an issue that can pop up quickly, and they must adapt their digital infrastructure to meet increasing demand. Azure offers hybrid storage solutions such as StorSimple to address these emerging challenges.
In addition to simple data storage, StorSimple offers various management features those growing businesses need. For example, StorSimple comes with data tiering, compression, off-site storage, DR, and archiving capabilities. With these features, StorSimple can cleanly sort information and isolate it based on usage patterns. By doing this, you and others in your company can quickly access the most pertinent information, whereas information you don’t use frequently is tiered to HDD or cloud storage.
Another feature of StorSimple is deduplication, where, using hash keys and metadata, duplicate data can be identified and compressed to optimize storage usage and capacity. This data is also encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption, meaning that not only is it optimally stored and archived, but StorSimple also protects it in case of emergencies.
Azure Services: Powering Your Digital Transformation
BCDR Integration
In addition to encrypting stored data, Azure integrates with your BCDR (business continuity/disaster recovery) strategy to ensure your data and business is safe. Azure Backup is a service that takes your already existing information and creates backup copies. As a result, critical company information such as files, folders, virtual machines, and applications are safe and stored entirely in the cloud so you and anyone at your company can safely access them.
Another exciting aspect of Azure Backup that makes it so attractive to companies is its pay-as-you-go model, so even smaller businesses can keep their information safe. If you already have a data protection management (DPM) system, you can easily integrate it with Azure, compressing and encrypting it to ensure it’s secure.
Another feature that makes Azure Backup so great is that it can identify new and old data, so it won’t “restore” already existing data. Doing this saves a lot of storage space, and in the case of a disaster where you need to recover information, obtaining all your data is easy. In addition, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) works with Azure Backup, so in the worst-case scenario, you can easily have your data and sites back up in working order without interruption.
These important features of Microsoft Azure paint a good picture of just how much Azure can bring to your business. If you are not already using Azure as your cloud hosting service, you should because of these features and the many others they offer. At Atmosera, we can help manage features like the Azure DevOps services for your business, ensuring that you make the most out of your Azure partnership!
