Looking to boost performance across the board? Explore how businesses benefit from Microsoft Azure Logic Apps.
What Are Azure Logic Apps?
Logic Apps is a Microsoft Azure platform that lets companies create powerful automated workflows.
Globally, more and more businesses are turning to automation tools to drive industry innovations, cover labor shortages, and out-perform the competition.
If you’ve ever looked on in despair at your firm’s inefficient operational processes, Logic Apps presents the ideal solution: a simple way to let ‘robots’ complete time-consuming manual processes so you and your team don’t have to bother.
Logic Apps workflows run on a series of triggers, connectors, and actions.
What Does that Look Like for Your Business?
Let’s say your sales team needs all email attachments saved to a shared storage space.
Manually, this takes up a lot of time downloading these documents and uploading them to the cloud. And that’s assuming there are processes in place to make sure this happens without fail.
Because mistakes happen, it is little wonder that human error accounts for the single biggest cost for businesses.
Using the platform, you can create a series of processes (the workflow) that begins when an email with an attachment is received (the trigger). This attachment is automatically uploaded (the action) to an external cloud storage space like OneDrive (the connector).
Now you know what a Logic App is and how you could make use of the platform, let’s explore some of the best reasons to make the switch.
Reasons To Use Azure Logic Apps
Save Time
Time is a firm’s most precious resource. And far too much of it is often wasted on repetitive, time-consuming tasks that could easily be automated. In the legal sector alone, it’s estimated that 23% of work could be automated.
Automation tools perform those long, dull tasks. Your team can then use their skills and experience to focus on adding value where your business needs it.
Efficiency has long-characterized business strategies: refining, streamlining, and cutting i.e., doing the same with less effort. Today, productivity—the art of doing more with less—is becoming just as important.
Logic Apps is ideal for this. Make a workflow once, then leave it to carry out the job. The platform has been designed to be accessible—so, even if you’re not a developer, you can still build powerful workflows. Not only that, you can access the Azure Logic Apps Portal through your usual web browser.
The user-friendly interface also means you can react, adapt, and respond to workflows, making changes on the fly to meet your business needs.
Hundreds of Integrations
Azure Logic Apps is a type of integration platform as a service (iPaaS). It’s a set of tools that connects with external, third-party software and applications, allowing it to be deployed across a host of different environments.
These integrations are known as connectors, which is an API proxy or wrapper that lets Logic Apps communicate with a third-party app. Logic Apps features hundreds of connectors to meet the broad and unique needs of unique businesses.
If you need to scrape contact data from a form and place it in your Salesforce pipeline, you can use the Logic Apps Salesforce connector.
By introducing connectors into your operational processes, you’ll find it easy to properly integrate without facing frustrating challenges getting your system to ‘talk’ to the software.
Improved Security
Data privacy and security are major concerns for every business—and global data security laws like NIST and GDPR only serve to strengthen that focus. In short: you need to keep your data secure or risk million-dollar fines and reputational damage.
One way to enhance your existing security processes is to use Logic Apps to schedule regular security maintenance and data back-ups. While you’ll still want to review these processes, you can be confident that your data security is being automatically handled.
This way, if the worst happens—you experience a data breach or outage, you can recover quickly, without impacting operations.
It’s particularly effective when maintaining NIST and GDPR compliance, where businesses must show they have proper processes in place to secure data.
Accurate Data
All businesses thrive on data. But to be truly insightful and actionable, that information must be accurate. How else can your firm build a growth strategy that works?
Data integrity, a core component of operational resilience, isn’t simply the preserve of financial service companies, where the difference in the placement of a decimal point can make or break a business.
Bad data costs money—a lot of it. One report from IBM estimated that inaccurate data cost US businesses $3.1 trillion each year.
Automation through Logic Apps eliminates this problem at the source. Instead of manually copying over data, where mistakes are liable to happen, the information captured by, say, your website customers, can be instantly saved and copied across the system.
Reduced Costs
As a business, you want to make sure your technology investments offer good value. The cost of a poor technology purchase is high, financially and operationally.
Logic Apps is built for any business budget. It’s a cost-effective solution that allows you to stop spending on costly on-premises-only infrastructure. Because it’s largely (though not exclusively) cloud-based, there’s no need for set-up and maintenance costs either.
The way the Azure licensing operates, neither you’ll have to pay for the resources you do not use—known as ‘consumption; you pay as you go—nor you’re charged when testing. So, you can make sure your workflows are first-class before full deployment.
Factor in the gains your company can make through automation of tasks, and the cost benefits will be clear.
Scale To Your Needs
No-one, not even the wisest business development manager, knows exactly what the future holds for your firm. All you know is that you need to be prepared.
Businesses aren’t static entities. Goals and needs are constantly shifting. The need to be flexible, agile, responsive to your customers, clients, and the wider business, is essential in today’s modern marketplace.
Logic Apps excels at scalability. Your business won’t need to build out your infrastructure or run resources ‘just in case’—which can be prohibitively expensive and wasteful. As a serverless, cloud platform, the platform scales up or down to deliver the resources required for each workflow.
Greater Visibility
Successful businesses need visibility over operations and infrastructure. Key stakeholders should be able to easily generate and access logs. It helps them understand what’s happening across the company, why, and how to respond.
Introduce powerful insights into your business with Azure Logic Apps. Monitoring, logging, and alerts are built into the Logic Apps DNA. You’ll also find custom support for Microsoft PowerBI for enhanced intelligence.
Take time creating workflows that automatically create reports and logs and shared—either based on schedule or action. This keeps everyone in the loop, allowing for greater diagnostics and audits to plan for the future.
Enhance Operational Performance Using Azure Logic Apps
Automation is no longer the preserve of big-budget organizations. Thanks to Microsoft Azure Logic Apps—any business can benefit from the power of automated tools.
Facing an increasingly competitive landscape, start by examining your current operational processes. Identify what’s working and where improvements can be made. And how Logic Apps can help you deliver on the potential to gain the business advantage.
Your journey towards true digital transformation begins here. Speak to one of our Microsoft Azure specialists today.
Azure Logic Apps is a cloud-based platform for creating automated workflows and processes.
Azure Functions offers more developer functions and a higher level of control. Logic Apps is simpler to use on the front-end.
Basically, a set of processes called a workflow is made, which performs actions based on triggers.
Yes. And no. You’ll need an Azure license.