Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform released by Microsoft in 2010. Microsoft Azure is the second largest provider of cloud services worldwide after AWS. Companies can obtain services from the cloud in the areas of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Users are provided with over 100 services to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud, locally and at the edge. These services range from computing power, storage, databases, networking, security to ready-made solutions for specific areas.
Microsoft Azure
Global infrastructure
The global Azure infrastructure currently consists of 54 regions and is available in 140 countries. The Azure network is highly available, secure and agile, enabling the deployment and execution of a wide range of business and consumer services.
Advantages
Speed
Performance is the key design component of AWS’ global infrastructure. Whether computing, storage, database or network, enterprises need a high-performance cloud infrastructure with low latency, virtually unlimited capacity, high availability and fast response to changing needs without performance degradation.
Productivity
Local data centers typically involve considerable set-up and administration effort. This includes setting up hardware, applying software patches and other time-consuming IT management tasks. With cloud computing, many of these tasks no longer need to be performed, allowing IT teams to focus on more important business objectives.
Security
Many cloud vendors provide numerous policies, technologies and controls that strengthen the overall security of your environments and help protect your data, apps and infrastructure from potential threats.
Costs
With cloud computing, there is no capital expenditure to purchase hardware and software or to set up and operate local data centers, which require server racks, 24×7 power and cooling, and IT experts to manage the infrastructure. That’s a lot to take in very quickly.
Reliability
Cloud computing simplifies data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity and reduces associated costs by enabling data to be mirrored in multiple redundant locations on the cloud provider’s network.
Scalability
The advantages of cloud computing services include the possibility of elastic scaling. In a cloud context, this means providing the right amount of IT resources (such as more or less processing power, storage capacity or bandwidth) exactly when they are needed – from the right geographic location.