The hybrid cloud offers businesses the benefits of both private and public cloud services. The Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform is a great example of an extremely powerful, customizable hybrid cloud solution. In this blog post, we will introduce you to the Azure Cloud Platform and give you reasons why you should adopt it.
We know there are a lot of different options available when it comes to implementing a hybrid cloud solution. This blog will cover the various components in detail, but if you’re looking for something specific, here’s a quick snapshot:
Why Use A Hybrid Cloud?
The hybrid cloud is an amalgamation of private and public clouds designed for organizations that need the flexibility of a public cloud service with the control of a private cloud. Hybrid cloud implementations give organizations the ability to optimize infrastructure, increase application performance, and improve overall business outcomes.
Azure Is Reliable
The Azure Cloud Platform uses a unique design that focuses on resiliency and redundancy to improve data center availability and service uptime. The Azure Cloud uses a “fabric” model that connects all components within the data center at layer 2 to create a single network.
This network architecture allows network traffic to be routed to the most optimal location within the data center, ensuring maximum availability and reducing the need for network traffic re-routing during an outage.
Azure’s network design also leverages a “load balancer” that distributes traffic across multiple servers if a server fails. The load balancer is also responsible for ensuring that an application is properly scaled when demand increases to handle a sudden spike in traffic. Azure’s load balancer automatically scales an application’s server infrastructure based on factors like visitor traffic, historical trends, and response time.
Azure Is Flexible
The Azure Cloud Platform’s core infrastructure is built on a standard-size “rack” that allows the azure partner to customize the size of the environment depending on the workload. This standard-size rack has been the industry standard for years and allows Microsoft to quickly scale the Azure environment to meet the needs of different organizations.
Azure’s custom size and scale also allow Microsoft to implement more sophisticated networking and security features and deliver higher performance compared to a virtualized environment. Azure also offers a wide range of “services” that allow businesses to adopt the Azure Cloud Platform incrementally.
This approach allows organizations to start with a small percentage of their workloads and scale as needed. This approach also allows organizations to adopt new technology as it becomes available, and customers have the option of migrating from one service to another.
Azure Provides Rich Analytics Capabilities
The Azure Cloud Platform provides organizations with a robust data analytics platform that integrates directly into the Microsoft data platform. This integration allows organizations to easily transform data and use it to drive business insights.
Azure’s data analytics platform allows organizations to easily process large amounts of data in real-time and then visualize the data in a variety of chart and graph formats. Azure’s data analytics platform also provides organizations with a “real-time insights” feature that triggers notifications when anomalies occur.
Azure’s data analytics platform also allows organizations to “publish” data from various Microsoft platforms and services to the data analytics platform. This capability allows organizations to easily transform and analyze data that is stored in Azure SQL databases, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint.
