MS Azure: Add-on Features That Can Help You Drive Your IT Business!

With Microsoft’s focus on “building the intelligent cloud” as the topmost of the three prime platform transformations, more advancements are being announced and implemented! With major cloud services like Office 365 and Dynamics all powered by Azure, more is expected out of this growing cloud business.

The recent sessions have also presented a lot about Azure App service architecture and what to expect from the service and its impact on IT operations.

Here are a few highlights on what’s new in Azure that may interest IT/operations:

Azure SQL Data Warehouse:

It enables on-premise data warehouses to expand up to the cloud on the basis of the requirement and then again contract. This means a complete enterprise-class elastic data warehouse-as-a-service, where you can scale it according to your needs. With this development, Microsoft is aiming to make the existing warehouses more advanced from the preconfigured Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence services like HDInsight and PowerBI.

Azure Resource Manager:

It is an entire solution for creating and managing individual resources. It can bundle virtual machine, SQL databases, NICs, storage accounts, networking, load balancers, etc. as a bundled template. The whole structure can be spun up for as many times as you need, once it is saved as a template. Thus, you can simply manage the complete resource group as a logical unit.

Premium Storage:

It allows data to be stored on the Solid State Drives (SSDs) and delivers high performance with low-latency disk support for I/O operations running on Azure VMs. Your applications can have upto 64TB of storage per VM and obtain 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per VM and 2k MB per second disk throughput per VM with exceptionally low latencies for read operations.

Azure Security Center:

In order to ensure right security controls to be configured and monitored for all resources an organization deploys on Azure, Azure Security Center is introduced. It will provide more visibility and control over the security and safety of your resources without impending agility allowing you to stay ahead of all cyber threats.

While these are a few highlighted advancements in Azure Cloud for IT/operations, there are many new features and demonstrations being implemented for the users. For example Application Insights for analytics on ASP.NET applications, full text search in SQL databases, etc. Thus, with its powerful capabilities, Azure is all set to become the most efficient and useful cloud platform.