What Are the Pros and Cons of Microsoft Azure?

What Are the Pros and Cons of Microsoft Azure?

[Jeffery Lauria] Hi, I'm Jeff Lauria, Vice President of Technology, here at iCorps Technologies. I'd like to talk a little about Microsoft Azure Cloud, and why Gartner has listed them as an industry leader in this sector. Infrastructure services are really a replacement for your on-site servers. So what you're doing is taking that compute power, and you're moving it from on-premise, up into the cloud. Here are a couple of things you should be aware of, and the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Some of the pros: high availability. Unlike most organizations that have a single server or multiple servers, if that server was to fail your servers are down, your compute power's down. Microsoft offers high availability in their data centers, not only local high availability but geo-availability as well. So, it's across the globe.

Security: Microsoft is a leader in security for cloud services in two aspects, both protecting the infrastructure from external threats, but also having your end users increase in their security position with things like two-factor authentication, and application passwords.

Scalable: highly scalable environment. You only pay for your compute power. So you can scale up and scale down as needed. As you add employees, you can increase the compute power. If you're running ports, for example, once a month. You can increase the compute power, and then scale down. That makes it a very cost-effective solution. As I said, you only pay for what you use.

There are some cons in the cloud environment. One is that it requires management. Just like a traditional environment on-premise where you have to maintain your servers, you have to patch them, you have to update line-of-business applications. You also need to do this in the cloud. This is not a SaaS solution. It's an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. So it does require maintenance.

In addition, you need to partner with someone who has expertise in cloud computing. A couple of shortcomings are going to be things like burn rates. People that are not familiar with the way the cloud works will take a server on-premise, take that identical configuration, and bring it to the cloud. And that is not necessarily the case. Doing so will increase your burn rate, which basically is your monthly spend. So you should be aware of that.

Partnering with someone who understands Azure, understands your environment, and can make a smooth transition will help you maximize your investment in the cloud.

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