5 Reasons Why You Should Consider Moving to Azure This Year

Azure is the perfect platform for integrated services, including virtual machines, webservers, storage and more. It’s entirely cloud-based, as opposed to traditional on-premises infrastructure; which in turn comes with benefits such as easier maintenance and only paying for what you use.

The benefits don’t stop there. Here are 5 reasons why you should choose Azure for your next cloud-hosted project:

1. Step by step migration

Azure allows users to migrate a complete solution to the cloud with ease. This would be really useful when first moving to Azure, saving you time, money and effort running into complex issues and not quite knowing what to do.

There is a step by step guide on how to do this, here.

2. Azure is Secure

Security should really be number one on your list of requirements for a cloud-based service. Luckily, Azure is one of the most secure platforms on the planet. Microsoft detects a whopping 1.5 million attempts a day to compromise its systems. We aren’t just fending off those attacks - we’re also learning from them in order to provide the best and most up to date security system to every Azure customer. You also have the ability to back up your data in different locations around the globe to ensure that if something were to happen to one of the datacentres, your project is safe and backed up in another datacentre.

Learn more about Azure's security by going to the Azure Security Centre.

3. Reliability

Being able to access your project at any time (looking at you, late night developers!) is vital for a cloud based service, especially if you have multiple teams working on the same project in different time zones for example. Azure uses ready-to-use failovers* and load balancers** to ensure that your project is always up and running.

* - Failover: a procedure where a system automatically transfers control to a duplicate system when there is a fault or failure detected.

** - Load balancing: a technique of distributing requests over a network when a server is maxing out the CPU or disk or database IO rate. The objective of load balancing is optimising resource use and minimising response time, thereby avoiding overburden of any one of the resources.

If you'd like to see the status of Azure, click here to see lot's of green ticks!

4. Scalability

As previously mentioned, scalability is going to be an issue if you have a sudden influx of traffic, or if you predict a large amount of traffic and you in fact have much less. With Azure you can simply add or remove more computing power as and when you need it. It really is that simple. Azure will also keep track of the traffic associated with your solution/project and can automatically adjust to meet your needs if you’d like it to do that.

Not to mention that this can save you money! Imagine a sports stadium that holds 30,000 people, and the average crowd is 23,000. But this year, the team that uses it has been winning every game and tickets keep selling out! Would you build a bigger stadium, perhaps to a 40,000 capacity? What happens if the team starts losing and attendance drops back down to 23,000? If it was an Azure stadium, you could add and remove seats as and when you please!

For more information on Azure's scalability, click here.

5. A great insight into data

The data that you receive from the use of your solution will all be tracked in Azure, and there’s no better way of visualising this data than with Power BI. Using Power BI you could learn how much the average spend on your store could be, how much time someone is spending watching your videos or even how many blogs your visitors are reading and then use this to your advantage by. With Azure and Power BI, you’ll be able to make the best decisions based on the data you’re provided with.

If you'd like to learn more about Power BI, not a problem; click here!

If you’re still not convinced, give Azure a go for free with £150 of Azure credit. Be sure to let us know on @TechNetUK on Twitter and TechNet UK on Facebook if you chose Azure, or if you need any help!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2018
  just perfect-I am loving it!
• Anonymous
  February 19, 2018
  Top reasons: Reliable and Secure, thanks for sharing!