Cloud adoption for enterprise workloads continues to maintain a torrid growth trajectory. Technology analyst firm Gartner predicts worldwide public cloud spending to rise 18.4% in 2021 to a total of $304.9 billion. The pandemic and the rise of a more remote and mobile workforce ensures that this trend shows no sign of slowing, with more and more infrastructure and services moving to the cloud.
Microsoft is a major force in the cloud revolution with its Azure cloud computing platform, which is now used by more than 90% of the FORTUNE 500. If your organization is considering moving to Azure or expanding its reliance on Azure as part of digital transformation, here are five common considerations regarding cloud adoption and how Microsoft Azure can help:
Microsoft Azure provides end-to-end visibility of your resources with its Azure Management Portal, giving you a personalized experience for monitoring your various resources and performing management tasks. With Azure, you gain an understanding of where your enterprise data actually is as well as visibility into who is accessing it – offering a consistent way of exposing your settings, billing information, infrastructure health, and usage data.
Azure allows you to easily control your environment by scaling it up or down. Virtual machines can be turned off or removed with ease. Do you need to set up a new server for a test environment? With Azure, this is no longer an operating cost – just spin up a virtual machine to perform your tasks and then remove it as soon as the job is complete. In contrast, decommissioning an on-premises server means dealing with the hardware until it can be sold or disposed of.
Security is a top concern when dealing with sensitive documents, which is why IT departments often feel more comfortable keeping those documents in their own on-premises data centers. However, cloud security is advancing rapidly and, in some ways, already exceeds what on-premises options can offer.
Just look at Microsoft. Microsoft alone spends more than $1 billion per year on cloud security. This means that when your organization is running Azure, you get the benefits of having some of the world’s most skilled cloud security professionals and the top cloud security technology.
Security best practices are shared across all tenants in the cloud. This allows for a uniform, ever-evolving model that’s responsive to emerging threats and offers strengthened protection. With this model, Microsoft is more effective at identifying weaknesses and quickly adapting (read more in the Microsoft Azure Trust Center).
Many industries and geographic locations require that strict compliance regulations are met. Microsoft Azure implements security measures that allow it to meet a vast array of compliance standards. In fact, Microsoft offers the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud service provider. The Microsoft Azure Gov Cloud is just one example of how the company is meeting the specific requirements of particular markets and industries.
Maintaining on-premises is more costly. By moving content from an on-premises data center to Azure, organizations can see a significant drop in their IT capital expenses – which shift to operating costs. By removing the need for server maintenance, not to mention SQL server licenses, an organization no longer needs to pay to:
To help control costs, Microsoft allows an organization to set monthly spending limits. Activity will halt when the spending limit is reached. The Azure Pricing Calculator also can help you start scoping out your Azure scenarios. For more about managing and controlling cloud costs on Azure, see what our technology experts have to say about The 3 Dimensions of Cost Management in Azure, and 3 Secrets Guaranteed to Lower Your Azure Costs.
Microsoft employs enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure an organization does not experience prolonged downtime. For example, all virtual machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set (machines deployed across Fault Domains) are guaranteed to have 99.95% availability. Read about Microsoft’s commitments to uptime and connectivity here.
Armed with this information, we hope you have a better sense of how Azure can fit your needs and help transform your business.