Organizations like yours benefit from improved reliability, disaster recovery, cutting-edge technology, scalability, and cost-efficiency by migrating to the Azure cloud.
Reliability
A common factor that drives organizations to migrate from their on-prem environments to the public cloud is problems with service degradation that leads to poor performance and system downtime. In fact, many of Atmosera’s clients have achieved 100% uptime after migrating to Azure.
Microsoft Azure’s global footprint is one of the ways it offers high availability and reliability to its users. There are 55 Azure regions (sets of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network) – the highest among all public cloud platforms, including AWS and Google Cloud.
Disaster Recovery
Developing a business continuity and disaster recovery strategy is much simpler in the cloud thanks to native tools like Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR is a built-in disaster recovery service that orchestrates and automates data replication on VMs to a PaaS service in Azure. Building a disaster recovery strategy used to be a very time- and resource-intensive process that organizations would rarely complete.
Leveraging cloud-based disaster recovery solutions costs significantly less than building and maintaining a secondary data center for disaster recovery on-prem. Recovering data from the cloud typically takes just a few hours at most, which is much faster than the several days it can take to recover a data center. The recovery is more dependable, with little to no downtime and data loss. Applications can keep running even during outages with automatic recovery between Azure regions.
It’s also easy to test disaster recovery plans and production workloads in the cloud at any time without impacting users or causing downtime, which is especially important for compliance requirements.
Cutting-Edge Technology
Access to cloud-native tools and PaaS services is a major benefit of the public cloud. Microsoft Azure has dozens of built-in tools to power organizations with analytics, AI, DevOps, data protection, and many more capabilities.
Developing and deploying applications in the cloud is significantly faster in the cloud, enabling rapid innovation and time-to-market. Azure Application service is a cloud-native tool that analyzes performance and monitors the health of applications hosted in the Azure environment, enabling expedient troubleshooting and maintenance. Azure supports all development languages and frameworks, and is conducive to open source integrations.
Maintaining an on-prem environment requires expensive hardware upgrades and repairs, which can be a headache. Alternatively, cloud services release updates on a regular cadence that are much easier to manage and do not require any downtime.
Scalability and Flexibility
A major benefit of cloud computing is its flexibility. A properly architected Azure environment can quickly scale to meet demand for additional computing power and capacity. For example, a retail company may need to scale up during sales and the holiday season, or an accounting application may need to scale up during tax season. VMs can be spun up or down almost instantly in Azure without any downtime. Organizations that require larger databases, rapid scaling, and/or the highest level of performance can leverage Hyperscale, a tier of Azure SQL Database that can auto-scale nearly instantly to large capacities up to 100 TB.
On the other hand, increasing compute and capacity of a traditional on-prem environment is a significantly longer, more complicated, and generally expensive process that may even require system downtime. Many organizations with on-prem environments either end up paying for more machines and capacity they don’t need, or actual usage spikes above their capacity and negatively impacts performance.
Cost Efficiency
The scalable nature of public cloud also makes it a cost-effective solution that ensures you only pay for what you need. In addition to scaling up to meet demand as discussed above, an Azure environment can also be scaled down during slower periods to reduce costs. The retail company and accounting application in the previous examples that scaled up during its busy seasons can also scale down their environments at less busy times throughout the year to reduce their cloud spend. An organization can also schedule scale downs for off-hours to further take advantage of cost-saving features.
Traditional on-prem environments require significant capital investment, plus ongoing maintenance costs. In the cloud, there is no hardware maintenance to worry about and comparatively fewer up-front costs. The costs of cloud computing are much more neatly packaged into an ongoing operational expenditure, which often translates to a higher profit margin.
In addition to being less expensive than competing cloud platforms and offering price matching, Microsoft Azure features various ways to reduce costs. Azure Cost Management is a native tool within the Azure platform to help you monitor cloud spending. It includes integrations with Azure Advisor and Power BI for more insights and granular data. Azure Hybrid Benefit gives cloud discounts for existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. Reserved Instances have significantly reduced costs for several of Atmosera’s clients who have predictable workloads.
A managed services provider (MSP) like Atmosera can manage your cloud environment to save your time and resources, as well as to implement best practices and continuous cost optimization.
Wondering if Azure is the right choice for you? Talk to one of Atmosera’s cloud experts to find the best option for your organization. Contact us today.