Gone are those days when you need to invest thousands of dollars in IT-infrastructure and storage. Cloud is the answer to all your data storage needs.
Cloud is no longer what it used to be even a year ago. The technology faces multiple challenges every day, and organizations keep updating themselves to counter them and hence it is in a constant stage of evolution to meet the client's unending requirements.
There are many public and private cloud solutions which now have many pre-configured services which can customize the service based on your requirements. These customizations form the basis on which various companies fight with each other to gain supremacy as the best cloud services provider.
In such a scenario, choosing a vendor has become a critical decision for the IT-managers. Many companies choose a multi-cloud model to meet the requirements of the project based on some niche features various vendors offer.
Infrastructure as a service
With many developments in the cloud scenario, companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google, HP, Rackspace have evolved from product providers to solutions providers.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing, in which the vendor provides complete or partial virtualized-computing resources which can be accessed over the internet. IaaS along with software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) are the three main categories of cloud computing services.
The biggest advantage of implementing IaaS is flexibility. With, IaaS you can quickly scale your storage space based on your demand. You pay only for what you use. It helps you avoid both the cost and complexity of buying and managing your physical servers and infrastructure related to data storage.
The flexibility of IaaS has reached to such a level that each component is now offered as a separate service component. You can to rent a resource for only as long as you need it and pay only for that amount of time.
A Few Advantages of Cloud-IaaS
Low Infrastructure cost – Let’s face it investing in infrastructure is sunk cost. The price of the IT infrastructure can never be recovered. IaaS has proven to be a working alternative to set up and manage your own on-site data center by reducing the upfront expense. IT is an economical option for start-ups, small, medium and large businesses alike.
Better Disaster Mitigation – There is only one way to mitigate data security or other disasters, having multiple copies of data in various places. But imagine the setup, operational and staff cost involved. IaaS offers high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery at a fraction of this cost and to in a much reliable manner.
On-Demand Service - With IaaS necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than the days or weeks—and sometimes months—it could take to set up internally. IaaS can also be scaled up and down soon as you have decided to launch a new product or initiative or drop it.
Stay Agile - IaaS gives you an option to quickly scale up resources to accommodate spikes in demand for your application. For example, you are a web-based travel domain business you can predict a jump before or during the holiday season and scale up your resources and down again when activity decreases. If you are a development company the shift is the other way around. Save your money by paying only what and when you use.
Outsource Maintenance - 90% effort of your IT team is focused on billing and simple maintenance issues. IaaS frees up your team so that you can focus on your core business rather than on IT infrastructure.
Stability and Reliability – Say goodbye to maintaining and upgrading the software and hardware and troubleshooting the equipment whenever there is a challenge. With IaaS in place, we can assure that your infrastructure is reliable and meets your SLAs. There is also no need to maintain additional backup devices and transfer as well.
Better security – With a reliable IaaS like Azure, security for your applications and data is assured. Risk and threat mitigation, they offer might be better than what you can attain in-house.
Faster Updates – Since in IaaS you need not physically install updated and everything is automated via the internet at schedules times, security, software and other updates are installed easier. You also need not set up the infrastructure before you can develop and deliver apps, you can get them to users faster with IaaS.
Microsoft Azure, formerly called Windows Azure, is probably one of the most popular IaaS providers available in the market today. Microsoft Azure has several advantages compared to other providers including competitive pricing, ultra-fast speed to access your data. The best feature of Microsoft Azure which is that lately, it is also flexible in terms of integration with a host of third-party transfer software, along with seamless integration with all Microsoft apps including office, Power BI to name a few.
Microsoft Azure offers a plethora of benefits compared to other service providers. Here are a few reasons where Azure is better than its competitors:
Scalability – One of the most impressive features of Azure is its flexibility to scale your infrastructure in no time. Based on your demand, you can both add and reduce the storage access in a few simple clicks. A feature which saves you a lot of money and your accounts department will love that.
Security - Azure is not only a secure cloud network but has an added security layer at the datacenter level to give an additional physical security option. Azure has many security assessments both public and proprietary to counter security threats of any kind. It has a 24/7 unified security management system, which works even in a hybrid cloud scenario, which gives you to give you the much-needed peace of mind.
Disaster Management –With regular security updates, regional and global fail-over options, hot and cold standby models and rolling reboot capabilities, Azure is easily the most resilient cloud infrastructure provider in the market.
Cost-Effective – With its pay-as-you-go model and extreme flexibility Azure’s IaaS, when used effectively, is bound to save your organization a lot of money bot in the short and long run.
Project Management Capabilities-Azure has built-in project management capabilities. It is one of the very few services which is development focused and is integrated into the delivery pipeline making it popular among especially many geographically distributed teams around the world.
Higher Acceptance and Access - Microsoft is one of the largest company in the world and windows is the most popular OS in the world. This makes the Azure cloud accessible from almost any place in the world. With its continuous integration capability with all the Microsoft apps, third party software, and other cloud services, Azure is gaining popularity among the hard-core Linux users as well.
Unique-Capabilities of Microsoft Azure
Besides the above features expected from a cloud service, Azure has some unique capabilities/plugins/APIs which are very helpful especially for predictive analytics, data recovery, and management to name a few.
Azure Cognitive Services Petabytes of data are being added and managed every day into your cloud. Data recovery and management are one of the key factors to make this data useful for your organization. Azure’s cognitive Services leverages the use of AI to solve your business problems. Azure is poised to harness the full power of machine learning, hence pretty soon its intelligence would be so advance that you can get predictive statistical analysis to get decisions, and use image, vision, speech and other languages to get insights and recommendations based on your data.
Azure Managed ServicesAs a trusted cloud solution provider for more than two decades now Microsoft is now building an extensive support system that will enable it to become a trusted advisor for cloud services. It converts the solution to a long-term contract based investment which can increase your profits by at least a 20%.
Open Source Business SolutionsAlthough traditionally Windows is not an open-source OS, and most of the other solutions by Microsoft are also similar. Azure is evolving beyond this notion. With the growing demand for integration with third-party apps and software, Azure is now one of the most flexible platforms to allow integration of many open source and third-party apps which you have already implemented in your organization. This makes migration to Azure easier, and faster compared to other solutions providers.
Azure Stack ServicesWe at Halcyon understand the need for privacy and security required for some data in some special cases and hence you might have to maintain your private datacenter. In such cases, Azure stack is one of the most versatile solutions available in the market. Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud platform that empowers your datacenter by using Azure services. Contact us to understand how Azure Stack services work and how it differs from your regular Azure services.
Azure SQLSQL is one of the most popular, robust and easy to use database languages. Azure SQL is a powerful combination of relational database applied to cloud services, and with help of advanced analytics, you get maximized performance, robust data protection and power of accelerated app development.
Leverage the power of SQL to manage and maintain your data. Ask us how!
Halcyon Technologies has successfully implemented Azure services to a wide variety of clients belonging to various sectors and domains. Here are a few example scenarios where we have leveraged on various features available in Azure as IaaS, SaaS or PaaS to help our clients.
Automation and Non-Automation Testing and Development
Azure different teams located in different parts of the world can quickly set up and dismantle testing and development environments. This helps in bringing new applications to market faster. We have also made sure our clients can launch, economical and scalable, test-scenarios and environments with ease. Azure also allows taking the storage need both up and down quite easily.
Website Development & Hosting
Hosting, running and maintaining websites using cloud services can be a lot more economical and flexible than traditional web hosting. With regularized backup and unified security, Azure is one of the most trusted services used by various client o fours who offer web development and hosting services.
Data Storage
Data storage companies offer just a platform and network infrastructure to provide quality and complex storage management systems. We have designed and developed several such architectures and infrastructures to our clients who offer secured data storage platform using Microsoft Azure. The Azure platform is robust to handle many unpredictable scenarios such as a sudden surge in demand, security threats and more. It has simplified planning and management of backup and recovery systems.
Web Application Development
- Azure provides the entire array of infrastructure to support web apps development companies, including storage, web and application servers and networking resources. Many of our clients have used Azure to quickly deploy web apps and easily on the cloud. They have also saved a lot of money by renting storage then buying it using easily scalable storage provided by Azure.
High-performance Computing
High-performance computing (HPC) companies require a lot of seamless integration of local storage to the cloud and then to supercomputers, computer grids or computer clusters to solve complex problems. Azure allows a lot of third-party integrations which many of our clients have used to solve challenging problems involving millions of variables or calculations. Few domains where Azure was implemented include bio-genetics research labs, financial and stock modeling and predicting companies, stock exchanges, geo-seismic activities predictions and more.
Data Analytics Companies
Data analytics companies use Azure and its built-in capabilities to store and evaluate data to come up with usage patterns. SQL integration with Azure and Azure cognitive science capability makes data-mining easy by identifying hidden patterns and data-driven predictions. Azure architectures developed by Halcyon Technologies has empowered many of our clients to take-up data science projects and become successful.
Halcyon’s Azure-based Solutions
Halcyon Technologies is an ISO certified, software product development and services company. We have developed and deployed several cutting-edge, cloud-based solutions for clients from various domain including healthcare, web development, travel, banking, and retail domains.
Our expertise lies in developing customized, cloud intrastate and architecture solutions using Azure, which can be implemented with very quick turnaround time.
Our team has decades of experience in implementing several successful projects for clients in the US and across the world. We have the vision, skills and the right creativity to come up with innovative, out-of-the-box IT infrastructure solutions using Microsoft Azure or any other service providers which suits your requirements perfectly.