Present age businesses rely on technologies and technological advancements to accelerate their growth in the market and become successful against odds. This is why maneuvering of technologies within a business is important. As of now, many businesses of various sizes seem to be satisfied with various Microsoft technologies that provide them with enough flexibility and benefits to keep pressing forward.

With the advent of the cloud technology, growth prospects for organizations significantly increased. Organizations have started seeing the potential of cloud-based models, hybrid or others, and cloud services that can give them a great edge in their markets. This also led to the rise of cloud IaaS service providers. And among those cloud service providers is Azure – a Microsoft technology solution that provides many practical solutions that promote business growth while enhancing operational performance and stability.

Azure’s Market Penetration

Though it competes with Amazon Web Services and Google Computer Engine, Azure still stands out as the most preferred cloud service provider. There are many reasons for this, including but not limited to the potential it gives organizations to expand globally with more regions compared to other cloud providers, its hybrid consistency, and its openness to open source technologies.

Its stats can vouch for this.

Azure adoption grew from 20% to 34% last year, reaching 60% of AWS’ market penetration.

Though AWS dominates the market, Azure has been catching up at a rapid pace and is speculated to surpass AWS in the near future.

Benefits of Azure

Azure provides many services including computing, analytics, database, networking, web, and storage. Many such services can even streamline software development. They all come with various benefits businesses can leverage to outpace their competitors. Here are a few top benefits of Azure your business can take advantage of.

1. Azure’s very fast: Azure’s speed is one of its greatest benefits. With Azure, deployment, operation, and scalability are considerably faster. Evidently, Azure offers unmatched functionality compared to other 0n-premises or other cloud providers. The popular cloud platform seamlessly integrates with Microsoft products.
2. Azure enhances business agility: Azure allows business to not just develop applications but also test and deploy them. They can garner feedback to improve the application further. This aspect of letting businesses explore new avenues without having to set up complex infrastructure is one of Azure’s key features. Essentially, Azure enhances business agility while allowing businesses to innovate without investing more money.
3. Expand globally with Azure: To catch up with its growth rate, a business must take into account the dynamic changes in performance and resource utilization. This is essential. With data centers operating on several parts of the globe, this can be easy. Azure offers just that with its global reach; its biggest benefit. Azure users, on the other hand, get a plethora of services and a fine experience regardless of their location.
4. Azure’s business focus with Visual Studio: Azure also brings Visual Studio with it, allowing developers to build Azure solutions in the leading development environment without hassle. This also allows businesses to integrate other disruptive technologies including IoT and machine learning with Azure to obtain more functionalities that tie back to their business goals.
5. Azure automation: Azure allows businesses to automate tasks in their Azure environments. This means businesses won’t have to spend time on monitoring and resource maintenance, subsequently reducing overhead costs and enabling them to focus more on business critical operations. All they need to do is to create workflows termed ‘runbooks’.
6. Azure’s analytics support: Azure comes with built-in data analytics capabilities allowing business to uncover and utilize valuable insights to improve critical processes, and for better decision-making. Businesses can use Azure’s Apache Hadoop-based cloud service named HDInsight to analyze data in detail by building Hadoop clusters.
7. Azure’s disaster recovery capabilities: When cloud technologies are involved, it’s better to have efficient built-in disaster recovery capabilities. Azure has it covered with global and regional fail-over measures and rolling reboot capabilities. While this may only come of use rarely for a business, it’s still good to know that ‘disasters’ won’t affect an Azure-driven business much.
8. Azure’s compliance is Microsoft’s responsibility: When one of the biggest corporations in the world is responsible for one of its products’ compliance, businesses won’t have to worry much. Organizations using Azure can trust Microsoft itself to do the heavy lifting when it comes to compliance. Reducing compliance-related complexities enable greater resource allocation for Azure-driven enterprises.

Conclusion

Choosing between AWS and Azure can be a bit tricky. But it depends on the organization’s goals most of all. Azure simply didn’t become the most preferred cloud service option for startups and other SMBs. Over the years, it proved its worth. This blog can help organizations, contemplating the impact of Azure on their businesses, make a choice worthy of their investments. They can learn more about Azure and its benefits from a reputed cloud service provider.