9 Business Benefits of Using Azure for Your Cloud Computing

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Azure is the platform of choice for many IT professionals who are finally switching to cloud computing but what are the real business benefits of switching?

Here’s what you can expect:

While these are general benefits of switching to cloud computing in general, Azure is particularly strong in all of them, and we’ll see why the platform does so well in these areas.

Why Choose Azure Over Other Cloud Providers

We won’t go into a full comparison between providers in this post (there are plenty of good resources) but it’s important to understand what Azure provides that others don’t.

A core strength of Azure, especially for companies migrating to the cloud, is the ability to “easily” transfer all of your Microsoft-specific infrastructure:

• .NET
• SQL Server
• Windows Server

… and more.

Especially with .NET infrastructure, you won’t have much luck using any of the other providers, whether it be Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Alibaba Cloud.

» LEARN MORE: See Why Azure Makes The Difference Both in Performance & Costs

Another strength of Azure is its ease of use compared to other options in the market, as well as the speed with which you can deploy an application from scratch.

Want to bring your code up on the internet ASAP?

Azure lets you do that in less than 10 minutes.

What’s more, the platform can do this at any performance level, whether you need one CPU to handle a small website or 100s of servers to host your corporate systems.

(Of course, the configuration for the latter will be more complex)

But in our years of experience working with public cloud providers, we’ve found that Azure is, by far, the most user-friendly (which isn’t a common thing for Microsoft products!).

NOTE: While Azure offer similar benefits as other cloud providers, its focus on user experience and especially cybersecurity make it the best public cloud for enterprise use, even above market leader AWS.

Azure: 9 Benefits That Make The Business Case

Can Azure make your organization grow effectively while becoming more profitable? And if so, how much time and effort do you have to spend on bringing up your Azure infrastructure?

Implementing something like Azure to cover the entirety of the business spectrum is all about your Return on Investment. These 9 benefits will make the case for you…

Benefit 1: Increased business agility

The first (and perhaps most underestimated) benefit of a platform such as Azure is its ability to significantly increase the agility of your business, or how fast you can react to change.

With Azure, it’s possible for any organization to:

• Test a business hypothesis by quickly designing, developing, and deploying a proof of concept and launch it in Minimum Viable Product (MVP) format quicker than with traditional tools, allowing for close-to-immediate feedback from end-users.
• Provision resources at a moment’s notice with just a few configurations. This provides all the computing power you need, for any mainstream technology you wish to operate.
• Migrate existing business infrastructure quickly thanks to Microsoft’s dedicated Azure migrate products and services which make it easy to take your workloads and transfer them to the cloud with minimal downtime and/or headaches.

Azure allows businesses large and small to operate 24/7, even when they didn’t think they’d be able to. That’s because of the tight integration between each of the cloud services offered.

With just a computer and decent internet access, you can tap into an incredible amount of storage, compute, and networking power, making your business more agile than ever.

Benefit 2: Lower IT development costs

Development is one of the more expensive practices in the workforce, and there’s still a shortage of talent in this field, making it hard to find the right people.

Since lowering wages isn’t an option in a field with scarce resources, you can lower costs by cutting hardware ownership as well per-device licensing fees (more on this in point #8).

The great thing about cloud environments is that they bring all tools in one place, making it a more productive and efficient environment for professionals doing their job.

These points are benefits on their own but, overall, they amount to lower costs in the long-term, also because of the pinpoint precision with which resources are prices on Azure.

You can choose to be billed as follows:

1. Pay as you go (similar to paying utilities)
2. Subscription-based (flat fee every month)
3. Per user/metric/log/etc (changes by service)

Microsoft offers a handy pricing calculator to see whether a cloud implementation of your existing solution would cost you less. Savings are as big as 10x what you’re currently paying!

Benefit 3: Higher developer productivity

Indirectly related to the benefit above, higher developer productivity won’t just bring down the overall costs of your operations but it will also increase its value over time.

As IT professionals and developers work in a unified environment where they can streamline their workflows, productivity goes up by a long shot. No more moving servers around.

Azure benefits from the 3 standard cloud models:

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Developers will spend most of their time in PaaS services such as Azure App Services and Azure CDN, whereas IT professionals will work at a lower level.

PaaS environments are renowned for their trait of increasing developer productivity since they abstract all the underlying infrastructure, making it easy for developers to focus.

It’s this kind of flexibility that makes Azure a powerful tool, and even more so when you think about its ease of use. Compared to AWS, Microsoft Azure is a lot easier to navigate.

(And it’s demonstrably cheaper too!)

Your developers will want to work in a PaaS environment, and your IT professionals will need the granularity of operating at that lower level. Azure provides both at the same time.

Benefit 4: No fixed licensing or installations

While per-user billing still exists in Azure, you won’t find any multi-year licenses attached to your hardware or software, making the process of purchasing computing power a lot easier.

No license attached to physical hardware also means no tiresome installations or manual configurations. All you have to do is provide your design and set up Azure to fit your needs.

The benefit is obvious here: more money in your pocket.

But the ramifications don’t end there…

In many ways, traditional licensing required a physical person to come to your office and install the desired business solution (unless you wanted to do it yourself, a headache in itself).

With Azure, you can stop using software whenever you want, however you want. Made a mistake on that one project that just didn’t make sense in the end? No stress.

Pausing billing on Azure is super easy, making your business goals more achievable by pure trial-and-error. Not all projects are bound to be successful after all.

You can see how this was a big problem back in the day:

• If the original design required a certain amount of computing power, plus a few networking devices connected to computers across the office, your price estimate would already be high. But what if you had counted scalability into a faulty design? That would mean purchasing more power than you’d need, essentially wasting resources.

• On top of the above example, per-device licenses are expensive. That’s because they come bundled with the hardware as one package, meaning that they’d last for the entire lifetime of that specific piece of hardware. But what if there was a better piece of hardware that came out just a year later? You’d be stuck with the older one.

Cloud computing made all of these nerve-wracking considerations obsolete, and that goes to the joy of anyone who’s spent enough time trying to wrap their heads around the problem.

Benefit 5: High resource elasticity

High resource elasticity refers to the ability of a cloud environment to scale computing power, allowed bandwidth, and other resources up and down at incredible speeds.

In fact, one of the biggest benefits that cloud providers offer compared to traditional IT environments is the ability to scale up when there’s a need to, and down when not.

This can be done automatically by AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

And it’s an absolute godsend for business owners.

Data centers are expensive to design, build, and get to a satisfactory operational state. Go figure scaling resources, only to find out you didn’t need them in the first place…

With elastic computing, that era is gone. Thanks to advanced tools and techniques such as load balancers and Azure’s Traffic Manager, managing peaks of traffic is a breeze.

Benefit 6: Scalable infrastructure

Elasticity is great when you don’t know you will need a certain amount of resources available to you, but what about when you’re 200% sure of where you’re going?

With a staggering 6000+ services (and growing!), Azure has the infrastructure you need to scale your business effectively. Best of all, you have it available under one roof.

Azure has a staggering 6000+ services that it offers as part of its IaaS offering, more than any other cloud platform.

Azure is currently the 2nd biggest player in the market, behind AWS (but catching up quickly) and ahead of Google Cloud Platform by a long shot. So there’s a lot they offer.

Some example services are:

• Virtual machines
• Container instances
• Firewalls
• SQL Servers
• Data factories
• IoT applications

… and tons more.

The best thing is that you can gather data from one part of Azure (for example, a Storage account) and integrate the information for a completely new project.

This allows for deep scalability not only from an infrastructure point of view but also from a data standpoint. You’re essentially given full control of your assets and resources.

Azure has more data centers across the globe than any other cloud provider, including AWS, meaning that services like their CDN are as powerful and scalable as it gets.

Benefit 7: Risk outsourcing

Five years ago, Microsoft was investing more than $10B yearly to get their data centers up and running, making moves towards claiming AWS’s title as “backbone of the internet.”

But why put all of your infrastructure in the hands of Microsoft? 

Because they’re taking the risk on your behalf…

Microsoft isn’t just taking on projects from SMEs, they’re onboarding huge corporations, government bodies, and entire nations onto their cloud platform.

If you think that such a massive operation would require huge investments in security, risk management, and top-tier IT prowess, you’d be right. Microsoft is the partner you’re looking for.

Benefit 8: Zero ownership

Ownership is a great thing, but not when the benefits of sharing resources highly outweigh the benefits of claiming the infrastructure your own. The problem here is with complexity.

Starting your own private cloud isn’t exactly a walk in the park, and even if you did, Azure is here to help. The matter is that traditional ownership models are falling apart.

It’s not just software that’s becoming more of a commodity with SaaS increasing in popularity but infrastructure and development as well with their respective IaaS and PaaS models.

With software, owning doesn’t equal getting the most value for your money, and the proof is in something like elasticity which is impossible to pull off unless you’re a Fortune 500 company.

Zero ownership also means less of a burden accounting-wise and, as mentioned in point #4, no hardware installation or fixed, per-device licensing that wastes resources.

Benefit 9: High efficiency

Ultimately, cloud environments are better for the environment itself as they operate with higher efficiency than a traditional data center due to shared resources and Automanagement.

Carbon-neutral since 2012, Azure is a better option not only for business but also for the planet. Yet efficiency with Azure doesn’t come only in the form of better datacenter usage…

In fact, it shows up in your bottom line too. That’s because higher efficiency makes it possible for all other benefits discussed in this list to generate tremendous amounts of value.

Whether it be a developer feeling more productive, a server consuming less resources, or no money wasted on yearly maintenance, Azure drives costs down across the board.

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The possibilities with Azure are (close to) endless. And the benefits are huge, especially for your business. Take the time to think about each item in this list and your end goal.

If you’re looking to migrate your Microsoft infrastructure, there’s no better time to do that… But if you want to start small, Azure is also a great place to learn about where you’re going next.

Every company is migrating to the cloud, whether it be private, public, or hybrid; it’s just a matter of time until small firms see the value in getting started with it as well.

With so much flexibility in the way its pricing is structured, and a complete implementation driving almost all business metrics forward, your business is poised to benefit from Azure.

Originally published Feb 8 2021

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