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What is Microsoft Azure?

The Azure cloud platform consists of more than 200 products and cloud services that are intended to help you develop innovative solutions and tackle today's issues. Build, operate, and manage applications using the tools and frameworks of your choosing across various clouds, on-premises, and at the edge.

What can Microsoft Azure be used for?

Azure is a fast, versatile, and cost-effective platform, with the finest public cloud price and features available. Let's look at how you can put it to work for you now.

1. Enhance and put in place backup and disaster recovery strategies

Azure is a fantastic backup and disaster recovery tool. Why? Because of its built-in integration, outstanding site recovery, and flexibility.

As a cloud-based solution, Azure is essentially versatile; it can back up your data in virtually any language, on any operating system, and from any place. You can also modify the frequency and scope of your backup routine (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.).

Tape backup has many uses, but it is limited as a stand-alone backup and disaster recovery solution. Offsite replication, low onsite maintenance, up to 99 years of data retention, little or no capital investment, and cheap operational costs are all advantages that Azure site recovery may bring to your tape backup. Azure backup keeps three copies of your data in three different locations within the data centre, as well as three more copies in a remote Azure data centre, guaranteeing that you never lose data.

When working in a Windows virtual environment, using Azure's built-in backup integration is a quick and easy choice. Azure site recovery integrates with the System Center and HyperV architectures, allowing Azure, System Center, and HyperV to work in unison.

2. Create and host online and mobile applications

With patch management, AutoScale, and integration for on-premise apps, Azure makes web and mobile applications autonomous and adaptable, whether you're looking for a platform for hosting, creating, or administering them.

With automatic patch management for your virtual machines, you can spend less time maintaining your infrastructure and more time developing apps. Azure also includes continuous deployment capabilities, allowing you to automate ongoing code revisions.

3. Stay flexible and scalable

AutoScale is a feature of Azure Web Apps that dynamically modify your resources based on customer web traffic, ensuring that you have the resources you need when traffic is high and saving money when traffic is low.

Using Azure, you can quickly connect your web app to an on-premise app. Employees and partners can securely access resources within your firewall that would otherwise be inaccessible from the outside by connecting applications in both locations.

There are three methods in which Active Directory should be distributed and supplemented

Azure can collaborate with your Active Directory to enhance your identity and access control capabilities, offering your DNS global reach, centralised administration, and high security.

You can utilise Azure to provide a global direct connect-enabled Active Directory architecture. Azure is the only cloud provider that can enhance your domain controller's scope while also consolidating AD administration.

If you have many locations or use on-premise or cloud applications like Microsoft 365, Active Directory integration with Azure will be a critical tool for managing and preserving access to all of these applications.

Azure also enables you to implement multi-factor authentication, which adds a new layer of security to your data and apps while requiring no more work from your users. Single sign-on for cloud applications is very straightforward to set up on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.

4. Innovate with IoT Industry Solutions

The scalability, flexibility, and security of Microsoft Azure make it a perfect resource for enterprises wishing to adopt IoT solutions. You can begin collecting new data about your company by connecting your devices to the cloud using technologies that interact with your existing infrastructure.

Using the Azure IoT Hub, you can monitor and manage billions of devices and gain insights to help you make better business decisions, improve customer experiences, reduce complexity, save money, and speed development.

Azure's improved security is a huge boon for IoT devices, which have previously had security weaknesses that hackers may exploit. Other benefits include remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and analytics.

Getting started is straightforward with Azure IoT solution accelerators, which are established templates that can be customised to your needs.

Is Microsoft Azure free?

Yes and no. When you sign up for a free Azure account, you will begin receiving monthly free quantities of various sorts of services. If you switch to pay-as-you-go pricing within 30 days of creating your account or after using your credit, you'll continue to enjoy monthly free quantities of popular services for the next 12 months. After then, if you use any of these services, they will continue to operate and you will be invoiced at pay-as-you-go rates.

Is Microsoft Azure SaaS?

In part, yes.

Microsoft Azure's main SaaS solutions are Dynamics 365, Outlook, and Office 365, which are all created and hosted on the platform. Azure may also be used to host your own applications in addition to accessing other Microsoft SaaS services.

One of the biggest advantages of choosing Azure as the basis for your SaaS applications is that it gives you access to cutting-edge technology and sophisticated capabilities like analytics and machine learning.

Is Microsoft Azure PaaS?

Also yes. 

If you pick Azure PaaS, you'll discover a wealth of options to assist you in setting up a cloud-based development platform. Azure will provide everything you need to provide cloud applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, from the tiniest web apps to enterprise-level software, including App Services, Azure Search, and Azure CDN.

Azure's PaaS options provide developers complete control over their applications, enabling them to focus on development while knowing that things like operating system changes and load balancing will be handled automatically. Businesses can take use of PaaS power with services like Azure Functions without having to worry about server setup or scalability, which is handled automatically.

Is Microsoft Azure IaaS?

Yes again.

You may choose to outsource all of your network and computing requirements to Microsoft with Azure's IaaS solution, eliminating all infrastructure from your own servers and putting it all on Microsoft's servers. All infrastructure is handled for you, so all you have to do is buy, install, configure, and run the software that runs on it, such as operating systems, applications, and middleware.

Azure provides a wide variety of IaaS services, ranging from computation and networking to security and storage, including Container Service and Virtual Machines, which can be used to host websites, store and backup data, create and test environments, construct web applications, and operate high-performance computing.

The main advantage is that enterprises who utilise IaaS have greater flexibility in accessing an IT environment that meets their requirements and may modify it as they like in a few of "mouse clicks," rather than wasting time buying, installing, and configuring real servers or hardware. It also allows businesses to avoid the headache of maintaining their own infrastructure and hardware.

Can Microsoft access my Azure data?

Customers may choose between high data security by default and as a customer option in Azure.

Customers' Azure apps are not inspected, approved, or monitored by Microsoft. Furthermore, Microsoft is unaware of the kind of data that users choose to keep in Azure. Microsoft does not claim data ownership over the information placed into Azure by customers.

Where are Microsoft Azure data centres?

As your data centres can be found all over the world. Each Azure geography has one or more regions and adheres to strict data residency and compliance guidelines. This allows you to retain your mission-critical data and applications close to hand on fault-tolerant, a high-capacity networking infrastructure.

You can see the Azure geographies on their website.

What is Microsoft Azure DevOps?

Microsoft's Azure DevOps platform is an Applications as a Service (SaaS) platform that offers a complete DevOps toolchain for building and distributing software. It also connects with the majority of popular tools, making it an excellent choice for coordinating a DevOps toolchain. Many of our clients at DevOpsGroup have discovered that Azure DevOps meets their demands, regardless of their language, platform, or cloud.

What does Azure DevOps offer?

Azure DevOps is a collection of services that span the whole development lifecycle. These are the ones that exist at the time of writing:

  • Azure Boards is a solution for agile planning, task tracking, visualisation, and reporting.
  • Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD platform that supports containers and Kubernetes and is language, platform, and cloud-neutral.
  • Azure Repos: Azure Repos hosts private git repositories in the cloud.
  • Azure Artifacts: enables integrated package management for Maven, npm, Python, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.
  • Azure Test Plans: An integrated planned and exploratory testing solution is provided by Azure Test Plans.
  • Third-party technologies may also be orchestrated using Azure DevOps.

What is the Microsoft Azure uptime guarantee?

What time guarantees will vary depending on the service that you're taking however it seems to be between 99.95% and 99.99% across the board.

If you're interested, you can see the full list of SLA's on their website.

Microsoft Azure for WordPress

Hosting a WordPress site on Azure is a great way to get the most out of your cloud and keep services centralised. 

Here are some reasons why Azure could be a good fit for a WP site:

Your users are more likely to have a positive experience in general: This is particularly true if your site has apps that need many content loading round-trips.

Azure has the ability to autoscale: it makes resources accessible on a global scale that smaller hosts struggle to match. This guarantees that your services are always accessible, no matter how busy they are.

It has a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that includes: For speedier delivery, Azure's CDN may store high-bandwidth static material. Edge servers are also used to speed up the delivery of dynamic content.

Through Azure Backup, your data is secure and simple to recover: This is true even if you lose data due to a breach, device failure, or outdated software.

Microsoft Azure for Drupal

Because PHP is now officially supported on Azure, it's ideal for deploying Drupal sites.

Here are a few reasons why Microsoft Azure is an excellent Drupal hosting option.

Drupal WebApp

Migrating a Drupal website to Azure Web App is a breeze. The full Drupal site may be relocated in less than an hour using simple procedures. The development of an Azure website, the establishment of a MySQL database and moving it to Azure Web Apps, and the deployment of the code using Git BitBucket or other version control systems are all straightforward phases in this conversion procedure.

Authentication, File Storage, and Other Ready Modules: Drupal has a number of ready-to-use modules for activities like access control, authentication, and distributed file storage. Developers may save a lot of time and money by using the pre-built connection with the Azure platform by using these modules. The majority of these modules rely on Microsoft libraries, which are fairly reliable and scalable.

Pre-installed Drupal tools

The Composer is quickly becoming the de facto standard for handling dependencies and packages in Drupal projects. Version control technologies like Git and BigBucket are popular among Drupal developers. These tools come pre-installed or as easy plug-and-play options with Azure's platform. As a result, developers may continue to use their preferred tools and optimise their development processes.

Tools for caching

To achieve a pleasant user experience, content-heavy websites should utilise caching tools and tools for offering improved search possibilities. Drupal developers choose caching solutions like Varnish and Memcache, as well as search experience enhancers like Apache Solr. These solutions are accessible as Microsoft Azure plug-ins, making it relatively simple to integrate with websites and improve website performance.

Application Insights is a very important tool for web developers since it allows them to monitor the performance of their live online apps. It identifies performance problems automatically and offers important analytics tools to assist developers in diagnosing issues and end-user use of the application. Developers may use the information to enhance their app's speed and usability over time. Application Insights is one of several Microsoft Azure services that is free to use until the application gets a significant amount of use.

Leading enterprises and educational institutions all around the world are using the Drupal and Azure combo for their online projects.

Among the most well-known names are:

  • ESADE Business School is a significant worldwide professional training company that specialises in providing high-quality training to clients in the luxury and hospitality industries.
  • INSEEC Group is a significant worldwide professional training company that specialises in providing high-quality training to clients in the luxury and hospitality industries.
  • Shezlong, an Egypt-based firm that provides online psychotherapy to millions of suffering, is part of the King Abdullah Education Tatweer Project, which aims to achieve Saudi Arabia's objective of disseminating education across the country.

Collaboration

Microsoft Azure is a Drupal Premium Technology Supporter. Drupal developers can easily start leveraging Windows and Linux Virtual Machines, applications, and infrastructure inside Microsoft-managed data centres all around the globe thanks to this alliance. Developers can quickly design and debug applications using the integrated Visual Studio tools. Drupal users may not only save money but also be more nimble thanks to features like built-in auto-scaling and per-minute charging.

If you're seeking a hassle-free Drupal hosting solution, talk to us about Microsoft Azure. For offering seamless digital experiences via your Drupal web application, Azure is very secure and delivers excellent speed. Microsoft also provides useful literature and videos to help with hosting and deployment.

Is Microsoft Azure good for the public sector?

In these constantly changing times, the ability of the public sector to adapt to new possibilities and dangers, as well as innovate and transform for the future, is more vital than ever.

Moving to the cloud allows businesses to take advantage of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), smarter security, and improved resilience and scalability. The UK Government has adopted a public cloud-first strategy, which it recently reiterated in its new Cloud Guide for PS.

The public sector must adopt hyper-scale public cloud capabilities in order to continue offering outstanding experiences for citizens, empowering staff with real-time information, and optimising and streamlining services and operations. Azure has been used to assist police in solving crimes, to assist NHS Trusts with AI, and to assist social care. In fact, we helped Croydon Council to migrate to LocalGov Drupal using Microsoft Azure.


 

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