Members of your U.S. sales team schedule an online meeting with their European counterparts, the video and audio conferencing is run through Microsoft Teams. All of your employees, from the chairman of the board to the people in the mailroom, have an email account they access through Microsoft Outlook. Your accounting department ensures everything it does is backed up on the cloud using Microsoft OneDrive. Nearly everyone in the office uses Microsoft Office 365 for everything from writing memos to generating invoices and keeping track of inventory.
What do all of these actions involving distributed computing have in common? Teams, Outlook and OneDrive and the corporate versions of Office are just a few of Microsoft’s many office programs that run on top of Microsoft Azure.
“Azure is the cloud platform that underpins all of Microsoft’s cloud services, including Microsoft Teams. Our workloads run in Azure virtual machines (VMs), with our older services being deployed through Azure Cloud Services and our newer ones on Azure Service Fabric,” ZDNet quoted Microsoft as reporting on its own blog in early 2021.
Whether you know it or not, the odds are your small to medium-sized business is using Azure, even if you have no idea what it does.
“The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge with the tools and frameworks of your choice,” according to Microsoft.
Azure is the foundational program Microsoft uses for all of its cloud computing offerings. To put Azure in perspective, consider a table. It has four legs and a top. You could not put anything on the table without the four legs, which are the core hardware components of computer processor, memory, motherboard and power supply. Just having four legs alone would be worthless without a top, which in this case is Azure’s function: it serves as the underpinning of your other programs. The tools you use, like Microsoft Dynamics 365, Teams and Microsoft Office don’t run in a vacuum: they’re all supported by Azure.
Azure provides three primary services:
Considered a hybrid cloud product, “Azure is the only consistent hybrid cloud, delivers unparalleled developer productivity, provides comprehensive, multi-layer security, including the largest compliance coverage of any cloud provider,” while also being less expensive than Amazon Web Services, Microsoft states. AWS is Azure’s main cloud computing competitor.
One report showed 234,731 companies using Azure from 2015 to July 11, 2018. It was ranked third out of 81 competing cloud platform and service products used by nearly 2 million companies. Two offerings from Amazon lead the list. Products from Google and Rackspace complete the top five.
The reason why 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft Azure is security.
“Everything sent within the Azure environment is automatically encrypted. The Azure network has automatic detection to prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, similar to some of the largest services on the Internet, such as Xbox and Microsoft’s Office 365,” Cloud Business states.
Figure: 1Organizations compromised by cyber attacks
In fact, according to Cloud Business; Microsoft invests $1 billion every year into security, which includes protecting Azure. In terms of security features that Azure uses to protect Microsoft’s many clients, including:
Microsoft also has 3,500+ cyber security experts on staff. Of that, 200 focus on finding weaknesses in Azure. The resulting information then becomes part of Azure’s operational security procedures.
Book a Azure demo and secure your data from cyber assaults.
If Microsoft trusts Azure’s security, your company should, also. In a series of four blog posts by Azure Security’s Director of Program Management, Avi Ben-Menahem, he provides three reasons why Azure’s infrastructure can securely keep their customer’s data safe.
“Microsoft’s scale of investments across infrastructure, hardware and experts are unparalleled. Microsoft provides a secure infrastructure for our datacenters, composed of segregated networks, well-maintained hardware and firmware, and industry-leading operational security processes so that you can have more resources available to deliver business value,” he concluded.
Data is seamlessly altered into a stream of meaningless numbers when encrypted and then decoded into everything from words and numbers to videos, all without human interaction.
Today, businesses of any size need to give serious thought to adopting Azure as their cloud computing platform of choice if they haven’t already.
Azure’s focus on security means you don’t have to worry that some external group is going to use a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack to damage or steal your intellectual property.
Constant, ongoing efforts by over 3,000 cyber security professionals as well as Microsoft’s ongoing effort to improve their products means your data is safe, not just today, but well into the future.
This website uses cookies.