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Microsoft Azure is one of the most popular cloud services in the business world, in 2022. It has been used to help countless businesses around the world modernise their IT infrastructure, and move to the cloud. We spoke to one organisation, a Microsoft Partner that provides IT support services in London. They described how they have been migrating their customers over to Microsoft Azure for the better part of a decade.
What is Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure has been around for a long time (it used to be known as Windows Azure); it is a public cloud computing platform that provides a wide variety of services. For instance, Microsoft Azure gives customers access to cloud-based compute, storage, networking, analytics, and many other services – in fact Azure contains over 200 different cloud-based products and services. Customers can pick and choose which products and services they want to use to build their cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure is a pay-as-you-go service, which can be billed annually or monthly.
The Cloud / As-a-Service Models
Microsoft Azure is a public cloud. As anyone involved in tech will know by now, the cloud is a technology that makes computing resources – namely servers – available remotely, over the internet. This negates the need for organisations to have servers and network equipment in their office, because they can host all of their data, software, and workloads in the cloud. If you asked nearly any IT support company, they would tell you that the cloud will eventually be the de facto technology for businesses’ networking and infrastructure requirements – though at the moment, there are still many businesses who have yet to make the move to the cloud. If your business chooses to make use of different Microsoft products, then you will be able to use many of the available Office 365 Solutions on a cloud-based network.
The primary way in which the cloud is leveraged to businesses is through the ‘as-a-service’ model. This is essentially where businesses pay for access to a technology, as opposed to purchasing the technology outright. There are many benefits to this, including (but not limited to):
- Cost Efficiency – Firstly, the cloud provider pays for all the technology needed to provide the service, and they usually invest in the most cutting edge technology. This means the business using the service doesn’t need to pay any upfront costs, or pay to replace / upgrade the technology. As-a-service technology is also scalable, meaning you only pay for what you have used.
- Ease of Management – As a matter of fact, customers have very minimal management responsibilities when it comes to As-a-service technology. The provider is responsible for managing and maintain the infrastructure, whereas the customer only manages their own resources.
Core Azure Services
The as-a-service model is used frequently to describe the core Azure services that businesses get from Microsoft. While there are more than 200 individual products and services included in Azure, they can broadly be split under the following 3 categories:
- Infrastructure (as a Service)
This is the most flexible of the core services that Azure provides, because it is the most broad in its application. With Infrastructure as a Service, you rent virtual servers, virtual machines, networks, storage, and OS instances from Azure. You use these various resources to build your business’ IT infrastructure within the cloud.
- Platform (as a Service)
With Platform as a Service, the customer gets all the same resources that they would get with Infrastructure, but they are not responsible for managing as much of these resources. PaaS is primarily geared towards hosting data and applications, as well as making it easier for business to develop and deploy their own software from the cloud.
- Software (as a Service)
Software as a Service is the easiest Azure service to use. The customer is not responsible for any of the management or maintenance of the software; they can simply use the software, and let Microsoft take care of the rest. The entirety of the Microsoft Office suite of applications are hosting and deployed from Azure, meaning they are software as a service.