Trends show that cloud data centers will process 94 percent of server workloads in 2021. The cloud is quickly replacing traditional data centers for most businesses.
Microsoft’s Azure platform is one of the biggest players in the cloud market. It’s a far cry from the days of having to run your entire business on Microsoft products and services though.
What is Microsoft Azure used for? Let’s find out.
What is a Cloud Computing Platform?
Traditional servers were usually hosted in data centers that provided a connection to the internet, power, physical security, and a certain amount of support. But you only had access to resources on your server.
If you needed more storage, processing power, or memory, you had to either upgrade or replace your server.
Cloud computing is a distributed model where you use resources from a much larger pool of servers. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform.
What Is Microsoft Azure Used For?
You can use your Microsoft Azure account for various applications, including:
- Virtual machines
- SQL databases
- Active Directory domain services
- Application services
These services let you create a virtual server on Microsoft Azure that operates the same as a dedicated server would from your customers’ and employees’ perspectives.
With some simple hacks, your users could be connecting to an Azure server on the other side of the world but would never know it.
The Benefits of Choosing Azure for Your Cloud Services
Azure offers quite a few benefits compared to a traditional server platform.
If you need to increase your server capacity for a spike in traffic or some other unexpected reason, it’s as simple as logging into your Azure control panel and increasing the number of resources you’re using.
Add another virtual machine, expand your storage, or add database capacity and it will be live almost immediately. The only thing that changes is your Microsoft Azure pricing.
The price you pay depends on the number of resources you’re using but it’s still much more affordable than traditional servers. And with the flexibility, you only need to pay for the resources you need.
With a dedicated server, you’d likely have to pay for more than you need most of the time to account for the odd spike.
One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is its distributed nature. When you create an Azure instance in your cloud, it’s stored in several locations around the world.
If the Azure datacenter goes down in one location for some reason, such as a power outage, your cloud will fall back to another location seamlessly to avoid any downtime.
For most of its history, Microsoft was a Windows-centric company. If you wanted to run macOS or Linux, they had little to no support.
That’s no longer the case. One of the Microsoft Azure fundamentals is that it’s compatible with any system. For example, there are lots of iPhone apps that use Azure for back-end services but it’s transparent to the users.
Don’t Put Off Moving to the Cloud
Now that you know what is Microsoft Azure used for, you can see the benefits of moving to a cloud platform. Even if you start to move things over one-by-one, you need to start thinking about the migration process now if you haven’t already started.
Be sure to check out the rest of our blog for more helpful articles about the latest technologies.