Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that offers more than 200 services that enable enterprises to build, deploy, and scale applications and infrastructure services across a global Microsoft network.
Some advantages that Microsoft Azure offers businesses are: cost reduction, flexibility and scalability, self-service, speed, enhanced security, regulatory compliance, centralized management, integration with other platforms and cloud computing, but what does “cloud computing” mean?
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is offering computing services over the internet. These services can be servers, storage, databases, networks, software, analysis, and intelligence, among others.
The main objective of cloud computing is to provide faster innovation, offer flexibility in resources and economy of scale solutions thanks to the benefit that users obtain from accessing information from anywhere and at any time when it is required.
Types of clouds and their characteristics:
- Public Cloud
This technology is based on “clouds” owned by other service providers who provide IT support and manage servers and storage over the Internet.
- Private Cloud
Some companies prefer to pay third-party providers for services to host their private cloud. A private cloud is one where services and infrastructure are maintained on a private network.
In this type of cloud, computing resources are used exclusively for a single company or organization.
- Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud and a public cloud. Here, technology makes it possible to share data and applications between them. When this happens, businesses become more flexible and with more development options as it helps optimize infrastructure and security.
Microsoft Azure Services
Once we have specified the types of cloud computing, we would like to delve into the benefits that Microsoft Azure offers as a Microsoft public cloud.
The services offered by Microsoft Azure fall into several categories, including compute, storage, networking, artificial intelligence, analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
One of the most popular Azure services is Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), which allows users to create and scale virtual machines in the cloud. This gives developers the ability to create development and test environments in the cloud, as well as deploy applications to production.
Among the main benefits offered by Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), are:
- Pay only for the processing time you use.
- Scale from one to thousands of virtual machine instances in just a few minutes.
- Protect virtual machines from threats; Encrypt sensitive information, protect network traffic, and comply with regulatory requirements.
- Azure VMs also supports a variety of operating systems such as Windows and Linux and integration with various software platforms.
Azure SQL
Azure SQL is a cloud database service that allows you to migrate, modernize and innovate, in the modern SQL family, databases in the cloud.
With Azure SQL, organizations can:
- Migrate SQL workloads with SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
- Manage cloud applications with Azure SQL Database.
- Extend applications to IoT devices with Azure SQL Edge.
- Azure SQL Database supports a variety of programming languages, including .NET, Java, PHP, and Python, and integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Active Directory, to provide additional security.
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning gives data scientists and developers tools to build, manage, and deploy high-quality cloud machine learning models in less time.
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is designed to deliver responsible AI applications with machine learning. Among the advantages provided by Azure Machine Learning are:
- Reduction in time with rapid model development improving productivity.
- Simplify deployment and management of thousands of models across multiple environments.
- Share and discover machine learning artifacts across teams for cross-area collaboration.
- Detect data mismatches to improve model performance.
- Evaluate machine learning models with workflows.
- Automated to assess fairness, explain ability, error analysis, causal analysis, model performance, and exploratory data analysis.
- Increase security in the machine learning lifecycle.
- Secure solutions with custom role-based access control, virtual networks, data encryption, private endpoints, and private IP addresses.
Azure App Service
With Azure App Service, developers can build web apps using a variety of programming languages and tools such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Python and PHP and use auto-scaling features to ensure applications run efficiently. It also offers a variety of additional features to help developers improve application functionality and ensure security. Azure App Service is a solution that enables developers to build, deploy, and scale web and mobile apps in the cloud in a secure and scalable manner.
Azure Internet of Things (IoT)
Azure IoT is a platform that enables organizations to connect, monitor, and control devices through the cloud. So, with Azure IoT, businesses can collect and analyze real-time data, build automation solutions, and make data-driven decisions. As is evident, it works for IoT devices through the cloud.
Azure Analysis Services
Real-time analytics are also part of Azure services. With Azure Analysis Services, users can build, deploy, and scale data analytics solutions in the cloud. This is how you can create multidimensional and tabular data models, build, and publish rich reports.
Among the Analysis Services we can find Azure Analysis Services and Power BI, which we talked about earlier.
Microsoft Azure products and categories.
Microsoft Azure enables and supports more than 200 resources for categories such as:
- Administration and Governance
- Cloud storage
- Data analysis
- Databases
- Container applications
- DevOps
- Tools for developing cloud applications.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- User identities
- Cloud-based application, data, and process integration
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Cloud migration
- Native and cross-platform app deployment
- Multimedia content
- Compute functionality and on-demand scaling in the cloud
- Immersive collaboration experiences
- Connecting on-premises infrastructures and services to the cloud
- Hybrid Cloud Security
- Web Applications
- Windows Virtual Desktop
At Nearcontact we are specialists in the Microsoft Azure cloud. We have certified architects and qualified consultants in digital transformation, so we can successfully collaborate on cloud projects with our services around the most advanced Microsoft Azure technology.
