MyMateTech’s view on why companies are choosing Azure

Every day I get the opportunity to work with businesses of all sizes looking at new projects and legacy solutions using Azure as the chosen platform to enable their business in more ways than IT ever could before.

Say what you see…

Businesses from all industries including financial services, e-commerce, gaming and law are looking at Azure as a way of transforming their legacy systems or as the platform of choice for new applications.

Azure gives them many advantages including scalability, cost reduction, getting infrastructure online, geographical performance improvements, moving to “serverless” offices or Data centres and removing the need to have as many staff to look after on site infrastructure.

Let’s take a look a look at some of these:

• Scalability — too many times I hear companies wishing they had the ability to scale their infrastructure to meet the businesses demands.
• Resources — Azure gives you the ability to deploy as much infrastructure as you need — anything from a virtual machines (vm) to a virtual network (Vnet).
• Cost reductions — moving away from 5 year contracts and over provisioned servers. This is my favourite topic and I will discuss this more later on.
• Geographical reach — with 36 Regions around the globe Azure allows you to deploy into any of those regions
• Reducing the need for on-site infrastructure- for years’ infrastructure has either sat in a cupboard or in a dedicated server room taking up space, however with Azure the infrastructure is held in a DC managed by Microsoft to industry leading standards.
• Refocusing staff on value added activities- For years’ companies have had to employ dedicated infrastructure engineers — now Microsoft do this for you and ensure the infrastructure is running as required.

What is happening on the ground…

There is nothing better than real life examples of how companies are taking advantage of these benefits and I have shown these below:

Templates

Too often customers say to me “My Sales Director would love if we could bring a customer online within a day” Well, we can, so let me explain how:

• Constantly sales teams are doing everything they can to get a customer to sign on the dotted line. Once that’s complete it’s over to the implementation and support teams to get the customer online — without Azure we would have to provision a new infrastructure each time which could be take anything between 10 working days to 8 weeks + lead time and that’s just to have the infrastructure delivered — imagine the ability to spin up that environment in anything from 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on the size of the platform.
• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) gives you this ability, forget the technical detail but imagine this as a recipe book for various IT infrastructures configurations — you can deploy ARM templates and they will stand up a replica environment based on the recipe.
• Imagine the ability to reduce customers lead times to a day or less — ARM gives companies the ability to write the recipe in advance (you could also estimate the price and share this with your customers) and when the customer is ready to go you start to cook in other words deploy the ARM template and you’re up and running in no time.

Turning it off

Think about your own home you don’t leave lights on or taps running when not need, it’s not only a waste of energy but a waste of money — so how does this relate to IT infrastructure?

• For years’ financial departments in any business have queried costs and every year review ways to save costs and IT is always at the forefront — well fear not finance friends Azure is your friend.
• Azure infrastructure is charged based on minute by minute billing and you only pay for the infrastructure when its online — this is very different to a dedicated server which runs 24/7 with a fixed cost.
• For example, you could have a script in place that brings the infrastructure online from 8am — 6pm and then it is run to turn the infrastructure off from 6pm — 8am (yes that’s right you only paid for 10 hours, cost saving anyone?)

Auto Scaling

Every IT department dreads the thought of running out of resources due to an unplanned event and every IT department gets it in the neck when an issue occurs that damages reputation or sales — fear not Azure has you covered:

• Azure has the ability to scale on demand to meet your requirements — for example let’s say your business appears on on a Radio or TV one night as part of a marketing campaign or it’s Christmas and everyone is on the system trying to get the last order in before the holidays — imagine you could scale your infrastructure to meet business as usual performance and during those planned or unplanned periods
• Across the Azure portfolio you can enable auto scaling based on particular thresholds i.e. if this happens spin up another server to handle the load and then spin back down once the particular threshold goes below X.
• This gives IT teams the ability to support the business during peak times, protects the businesses reputation and means budget owners only pay for what they use — this is definitely appealing to any business owner.

Storage Alternatives

Many businesses and IT systems require storage to run and backup the business day to day but this can get expensive, especially with current storage pricing — Azure pricing for 10TB of Blob Storage: £144.26 per month (at time of publication).

• Azure is providing highly available storage in all regions with the ability to keep the stored items in one or multiple regions for backup and recovery plans.
• Many companies have mountains of data that doesn’t require high performance and so rather than paying top money they offload it to Azure.
• You can store any type of unstructured data — this could be for example product images, training videos, podcast audio, generic company on boarding documents, and more at insanely low prices.

Enterprise IT for all

Too many times I hear “we don’t have a test and development environment due to cost” or “we don’t have Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for our infrastructure as it would double our costs” — I understand these comments in the old world but using Azure this isn’t the case!

• Test and Development are key to any business as they stop changes being made direct to production without testing — IT DR environments allow you to get back online faster in the event that you have to evoke your Business Continuity Plan (BCP).
• Azure gives you the ability to create these environments using either IaaS or PaaS resources such as Azure Site Recovery.
• Azure is billed on a minute by minute bases meaning that these environments can be powered up when required and turned off when not in use — now anyone can have access to the Enterprise IT that only used to be for larger companies and the Enterprises can now take advantage of the cost savings.

Review with a view

Azure is opening up so many possibilities for all businesses. The above are just some of the examples that I am seeing today and I encourage you to explore Azure and look at how it could assist you and your business strategy.

Microsoft houses will gain great advantage of using Azure and it doesn’t need to be a full move to Azure, it could be extending your environment to Azure to take advantage of features such as SQL Server Stretch Database.

Azure is constantly launching product portfolio updates (800 in 2015) and this will not stop — the question for any business is, will any of these updates going to benefit us?

MyMateTech’s Conclusion

Today’s world is showing that if a business understands how to increase revenue streams and reach new customers they are the companies that are excelling. Examples such as Templates (ARM) or geographical reach (Azure Regions) allow any business to achieve this. Previously this was not always possible or simply too expensive.

Microsoft have invested billions into Azure and hence it is leading cloud transformation in business. This won’t stop and will only benefit customers and partners as Azure and AWS go head to head.

I highly recommend looking at Azure in your business review or planning if you have not already — especially if you’re a Microsoft house or .net developer, Azure should be your platform of choice!

Any business owner or CEO will welcome any opportunity to make the business go faster and any financial decision maker will welcome any cost savings that can be made.

I feel that Microsoft haven’t even scratched the surface with Azure and there is much more to come. The question for me is when, not if you will come on board?