Why choose Azure for your business?

Joshua White

Last updated on 26/10/2021

Microsoft Azure is a powerful cloud platform covering a multitude of products in and beyond traditional hosting services and virtual servers, all offered at a low total cost of ownership. Azure has over six thousand different cloud services, and as such, as your business grows, your cloud environment grows with it. Below are our recommendations for why you should use Azure for running your business.

Cost Effective

Azure offers most of its services at an elastic price, meaning you only pay for what you use, as and when you use it. You can shut down services on demand to save costs and quickly bring them back to life when needed, as well as increase or decrease allocated system resources, to cope with varying levels of demand.

Some of Azure’s Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service offerings are often cheaper to host in the cloud in the long term as they are fully managed by Microsoft, removing the need for employing highly skilled & expensive IT technicians. Such PaaS and IaaS services include:

• Cloud Databases – in a variety of different types of SQL, or Azure’s own Cosmos DB
• Web Applications – host your website on a serverless architecture in any language - .NET, Java, PHP, or NodeJS, to name a few. We host all our .NET Web Application projects on the Azure App Service, including our bespoke flagship product The Studio, a powerful estate agency marketing platform.
• Virtual Machines – spin up a Linux virtual machine within seconds and manipulate the system over SSH, or quickly build a cluster of Windows servers that you can log into via RDP – this is a particularly good choice for setting up SharePoint Server instances like we have done for Invesco, or for setting up WEBCON BPS like we have done for Max Barney.

You May Already Have Azure

Microsoft 365 is hands down the leader in the business productivity and collaboration software market; if you are using the powerful Microsoft 365 suite then by default you also have Azure — why not make the most of it? Migrate your workflows to Azure and take full advantage of the Microsoft Cloud.

Azure Grows with Your Business

As your business expands, you will inevitably find your cloud hosted solutions requiring more resources to handle higher levels of demand – you can scale your solutions both vertically, i.e. adding / removing RAM & CPU allocation, or horizontally, by expanding your application onto a second, third, and even tenth, instance. Use Azure Monitor to your advantage – it can identify where you can save costs.

Mobile Application

If you rely on manually shutting down or starting up services on demand – the Azure mobile app is ready to assist you if you’re on the go. In addition to this, you can see your resources at a glance, recent network load and resource utilisation, and Azure health alerts – allowing you to get a quick performance snapshot whilst out and about.

Azure Marketplace

Azure scales far beyond Microsoft’s own products & services. Just like your smartphone has an app store, Azure has a marketplace for third party extensions such as SendGrid, one of the most popular email APIs that you can configure quickly – gone are the days of configuring DBMail!

Are You ready to use Azure?

If you’re considering migrating your existing workloads to Azure, or starting off with a fresh environment, please do not hesitate to get in touch in with us. We have a team of qualified Azure experts ready to help you – and can help you get the best value for money. Azure’s full cloud offering may seem overwhelming but in reality it takes an underwhelming matter of minutes to get started.