Application hosting on Azure, an Infrastructure as a Service, is a game-changer.

A familiar Microsoft IT infrastructure concept on modern technology and quick to build an environment, deploy, administer, and monitor virtually.

Although there is a lot to discuss in Azure, we cover three core aspects in this article to help your decision moving to the cloud.

Highly available

Azure is a reliable cloud infrastructure as service (IaaS) that can meet the requirements of small-medium businesses to enterprises.

The global infrastructure presence and state of the art datacenters in multiple zones and regions with Internet bandwidth up to 1.6Pbs make Azure core services to be highly available.

Besides, configuring the system to failover to an alternate data center will be helpful in case of an outage.  And configuring availability sets (a group of active servers) helps in load balancing and keep your environment running managing traffic on live servers.

A recent update from Microsoft states that Azure uptime was 99.995% in the last twelve months across the global infrastructure.

Pricing & cost management

Azure is consumption-based pricing, and you only pay for usage.

Azure lets you monitor costs, notifies alerts to stakeholders of spending against the budget, and cost thresholds.

To be on top of your IT budget with Azure, you can plan based on your requirements.

Preparing an estimate for your requirement using the Azure price calculator gives you a clear understanding of what it takes to host your applications on Azure.

Comprehensive Security

In Azure, security measures are compliant with global standards and local regulations, and keeps data private, protected, and are fundamentally reliable.

At a physical level, data in facilities meet industry-leading physical security systems.

Azure is compliant with FFIEC, HIPPA/HITRUST, PCI DSS, and FEDRAMP.

Besides, Azure security maintains separate measures for storage, network, and data.

Security is a vast subject, and we can divide it into infrastructure level and user level to keep it simple.

If considering cloud hosting on Azure, it provides greater security.  On the other hand, user security starts with organization management. 

Our future articles will be focusing on user-level security and preventive steps against cyberattacks, so subscribe to our feed and stay up to date.

Summarizing

Application hosting on Azure is beneficial due to its highly available data center in zones and multiple regions.  Downtime is a rare occurrence. Next, the usage-based pricing allows businesses to estimate, budget, and track the actual costs against the threshold.

The third is security.  Azure is compliant with the major industry standards and regional regulations essential for an organization to put their data on the cloud.

Where do you start? Find a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider who has hands-on experience building the IT environment and deploying applications on Azure.

AEC Cloud is a Microsoft CSP and been assisting our clients on application hosting.  Schedule a FREE consultation call now or contact us to learn more.