Why Move from On-Premises to Microsoft Azure

As business IT needs change, businesses are looking for ways to improve their efficiency and agility. One of the best ways to do this is to move from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. 

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud platforms on the market, helping businesses of all sizes to manage these challenges and meet their organizational goals. Some of the reasons you should consider moving to the cloud are cost savings and easy scalability, reliability, data security, compliance, and access to leading PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings. 

Benefits of Moving to Microsoft Azure

Cost Efficiency

One of the biggest benefits of moving from on-premise to the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure, is the potential cost savings. With Azure, you can shift from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operating expenditures (OpEx), meaning you no longer have to invest upfront in server infrastructure. Instead, you only pay for the services you use and can scale those according to your business needs.

For consistent workloads, you can leverage reserved instance pricing to reduce costs even more. Reserved instances are Azure services that you can purchase for a one- or three-year commitment. In exchange for your commitment, you’ll receive a significant discount on the price of the resource.

Scalability 

With Azure, you don’t need to purchase more capacity to meet your highest workload demand levels. Instead, you can leverage auto-scaling to automatically scale out your workloads during periods of high demand and scale them back during periods of lower demand. 

Auto-scaling is a feature that allows you to automatically adjust the number of instances your application needs based on demand. This means you can always have the right amount of resources to meet your needs, without having to worry about managing them yourself. Auto-scaling can also improve performance, reduce costs, and help avoid outages.

Reliability and High Availability

Microsoft Azure is one of the most reliable and highly available cloud platforms on the market. Azure offers a wide range of features and services that can help you achieve high availability for your applications and data. High availability means a computer system can keep running even if some parts of it fail, helping to minimize or eliminate downtime.

An important aspect of Azure’s reliability is its financially backed service level agreement (SLA). Azure SLAs guarantee a certain level of uptime and performance for their services. 

Finally, Azure makes it easy to meet high-availability requirements by leveraging its availability zones and geo-replication features. For example, you can use Azure availability zones to deploy your virtual machines (VMs) across multiple, physically isolated zones within a region. This helps protect your systems from failures that affect a single zone. You can also use Azure geo-replication to replicate your data across multiple regions, helping to protect data and systems from failures that affect an entire region. 

Safeguard Data 

Microsoft Azure offers a wide range of features and services that can help protect your data from unauthorized access, loss, or corruption. One of the most important aspects of Azure’s data security is its geo-redundant backups, providing durability of at least 99.99999999999999% over a given year. 

Geo-redundant backups replicate your data to multiple regions around the world. Meaning, that if there is a failure in one region, your data will be available in other regions. Azure also offers a variety of other security features, such as encryption, access control, and auditing. 

In addition to its data security features, Azure also offers advanced networking security. Azure allows you to create private virtual networks (VPNs) to isolate your network from the public internet. You can also use Azure private endpoints to keep sensitive data private.

Compliance

Microsoft Azure is one of the most compliant cloud platforms on the market, offering a wide range of compliance services to help businesses meet their requirements. These services include certifications for ISO, SOC, PCI, and many more. 

Azure offers a variety of tools and sources to help businesses with their compliance efforts. For example, Azure provides the Azure Compliance Manager tool, which can help businesses assess and manage their compliance posture. Azure also offers a variety of documentation and guidance on how to meet your specific compliance requirements. 

Access to Leading PaaS Offerings

Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of leading Platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. These include databases (Azure SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, etc.), storage (Azure blob storage), containers, (Azure web apps for containers, Azure Kubernetes service), serverless (Azure function apps, Azure automation account), and more. 

PaaS offerings provide a number of benefits, including:

• Reduced administration: PaaS offerings help ease the burden of infrastructure management to Microsoft, freeing up your team to focus on your product instead.
• Time and money savings: PaaS offerings can save you a significant amount of time, as you no longer need to stress about setting up and managing your own infrastructure.
• Seamless updates: PaaS offerings are automatically updated, so you don’t have to worry about keeping your infrastructure up-to-date. 

Moving from on-premise to Microsoft Azure can offer many benefits for businesses of all sizes, including cost savings, scalability, reliability, data security, compliance, and access to leading PaaS offerings. 

If you have any questions or want to learn more about our Azure services and how we can help you get the most out of your investment, please contact us today.