Many organizations have adopted Microsoft Azure as a powerful tool as the business world evolves with technology. This cloud computing service provides a range of applications and features, extending beyond just data management. If you’re curious about the key elements of Microsoft Azure, keep reading. In this article, we’ll explore the key features of this innovative cloud platform.
Single-Pane Operations
Microsoft Azure offers an exciting capability called single-pane operations, which can simplify the management of hybrid environments. The OMS (Operation Management Suite) is a Management-as-a-Service that provides a single interface to manage hybrid environments. It also offers a log analytics solution that collects and consolidates data from various sources such as virtual machines, storage, network services, and logs.
As hybrid infrastructures bring new security challenges, OMS provides various security solutions and automation features to meet these challenges. OMS security solutions provide valuable information about the level of interconnectivity between various resources present in a network infrastructure. For example, OMS can provide information on patch levels, malware infections, and threat intelligence.
DevOps
Microsoft Azure’s DevOps services are one of its most notable features, providing a solution for breaking down the traditional barriers that can hinder IT operations teams. This approach enables businesses to create more cohesive products in a faster, more cost-effective, and higher-quality way. Building, testing, and deploying application upgrades or fixes is a common challenge for companies. However, these processes can be streamlined with the use of DevOps services.
By adopting a DevOps development model, various teams can collaborate on an application’s entire lifecycle. By working side by side, engineers can develop, test, deploy, and resolve bugs within an application. This approach also involves integrating quality assurance and security teams and utilizing automated tooling and stack technology to reduce team workload. This strategy allows teams to concentrate on more specialized aspects of the application development process.
Using DevOps ultimately leads to a faster turnaround time for your team. This can simplify innovation for customers, making it easier to respond to changing markets and scale your business more efficiently. When integrated with the business, DevOps can create and improve products at a quicker pace while also addressing customers’ diverse needs. Microsoft Azure’s DevOps services provide numerous business benefits, including rapid application delivery.
Easy Management Services
Microsoft Azure can handle several management and automation services, making automating several manual and repetitive cloud tasks easy. These tasks are usually tedious and time-consuming, which can lead to IT professionals being unable to utilize their skills effectively. Furthermore, these manual tasks are prone to errors, making them a significant risk for the organization.
With Azure’s automation services, businesses can streamline their operations, allowing developers to concentrate on more complex IT processes. Along with automation, Microsoft Azure offers developers various software tools to create and manage runbooks, which can help them orchestrate and automate these processes. These automation services and tools significantly reduce the workload on IT professionals and ensure consistency and accuracy across the organization’s cloud environment.
Capacity Management
Azure offers a range of storage solutions to address the ever-growing storage demands many businesses face. With the growth of companies, storage capacity issues arise, and businesses must adapt their digital infrastructure to meet the increasing demand. To address this challenge, Azure offers hybrid storage solutions like StorSimple.
Apart from primary data storage, StorSimple offers a range of management features essential for growing businesses. For example, it provides compression, data tiering, disaster recovery (DR), off-site storage, and archiving capabilities. StorSimple can sort and isolate information based on usage patterns using these features. This enables quick access to relevant information, while infrequently accessed data is tiered to cloud storage or HDD.
Deduplication is another essential feature of StorSimple. Duplicate data is identified and compressed to optimize storage usage and capacity using hash keys and metadata. StorSimple encrypts this data with AES 256-bit encryption, ensuring the secure storage and emergency protection.
BCDR Integration
Microsoft Azure provides additional security measures for your stored data by integrating with your BCDR strategy. Along with encryption, Azure Backup is a service that creates backup copies of existing data, ensuring that critical company information, including files, folders, virtual machines, and applications, is securely stored in the cloud. This approach provides safe access to data for you and other company members.
Azure Backup’s pay-as-you-go model makes it a viable option for companies of all sizes to keep their information safe. Integration with Azure is effortless for those already using a data protection management (DPM) system. Data can be compressed and encrypted to ensure its safety, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking additional security for their critical information.
Azure Backup has an intelligent feature that efficiently identifies old and new data. This feature eliminates the need to “restore” existing data, saving precious storage space. In a disaster, all your data is easily recoverable, and Azure Site Recovery works seamlessly with Azure Backup to ensure that your data and sites are restored without interruption.
Microsoft Azure’s many benefits make it an excellent cloud hosting service for businesses of any size. If you haven’t already implemented Azure in your organization, it is highly recommended that you do so. At Innovatech, our services include managing Azure DevOps features for your business to help you optimize the benefits of your Azure partnership.
