Six reasons why you should consider Microsoft Azure

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the global cloud computing market grew by 24 percent in 2017, valuing it at more than $180 billion.

As a Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Partner, our customers are increasingly choosing Microsoft Azure as their preferred platform for their “modern Data Centre” providing the full set of integrated services, including virtual machines, webservers, storage, Machine Learning and AI and far, far more.

1. So, why Azure?

As you’d imagine (but for avoidance of doubt), Azure is an entirely cloud-based infrastructure, which can provide huge benefits including faster and more agile deployment, easier maintenance, seamless automation and of course only paying for what you consume.

From the deployments and projects we have undertaken so far, we wanted to share the top reasons our customers are working with us to move and adopt Microsoft Azure.

2. Migrate at your pace – workload by workload

With Microsoft Azure, organisations can migrate individual services, specific workloads or complete data centre environments to the cloud with ease. Whilst not every workload can simply be lifted and shifted to Azure “as-is”, our cloud discovery workshops will help your organisation profile and identify quick-wins to accelerate your journey to cloud. Our discovery workshop and cloud roadmap ensures your cloud adoption fits your technical, operational and financial objectives as part of a cloud-first strategy.

3. Secure by default

Simply put, Microsoft Azure is one of the most secure platforms that exists today and is trusted by organisations such as the UK Ministry of Defence, Local Gov, Health Care and many of the FTSE 100 and 250 companies. Being a constant target (as you’d imagine), Microsoft detects and defends against more than 1.5 million attempts a day to compromise its systems. Combined with the telemetry data from this and their vast Office 365, Xbox Live and Skype consumer services, Microsoft learn from each attempt to continually evolve and enhance their defence protection which in turn benefits every Azure customer. Azure also allows customers complete flexibility to where their data is stored (key for local governance and compliance) and have the ability to back up their data in different regions around the globe.

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

4. Financially backed Reliability and Availability

Microsoft Azure is highly reliable and provides financially backed availability SLAs. With general availability of Azure services in over 36 regions around the globe, Azure provides a wide range of options for data residency, resilience and workload placement. Azure uses both its own as well as industry leading third party firewalls, global load balancers and access control to ensure that Azure services are secure and available.

Microsoft provides a live global Azure Dashboard which shows availability, status and planned outages.

5. Unprecedented Scalability (up and down)

Most performance issues within a business’s application or data centre are due to lack of infrastructure, CPU power or disk performance (resource). This makes it really hard for organisations to scope and build data centre resources that can cope with peaks and troughs in usage and desired performance (end of month, winter sales, etc). Azure allows customers to very easily add or remove, computing power, storage, regions and services as and when its needed. Azure keeps track of all the traffic and workload consumption and can predict and automatically scale up and down to meet your needs.

6. Cost Control and Visibility

Many of our customers are using Azure as their global data centre(s) and are closing expensive poorly utilised Data Centres in return. This is freeing up physical space, eliminating the huge power consumption required to run these data centres and reducing or removing the capital and operational expenditure of data centre hardware and maintenance whilst delivering a superior service.

If you’re still not convinced, book one of our Free Cloud Workshops and we’ll also (in conjunction with Microsoft) show you how to get started with £150 of Azure credit.

Written by Cisilion CSO, Rob Quickenden. Like Rob’s content? You can connect with him here.