Discover the top 10 reasons why you should choose Microsoft Azure for your business

Microsoft Azure empowers your business continuity with its advanced disaster recovery and high-availability solutions. With its globally distributed infrastructure, Azure enhances your disaster recovery capabilities through services like:

• Azure Site Recovery – Automates VM replication, providing a secondary data site.
• Azure Backup – A scalable solution for backing up and restoring data swiftly, with seamless integration across Azure services.
• Azure Storage Replication – Delivers five replication options, including cross-region and intra-region data synchronisation.

Azure upholds security and compliance by adhering to multiple industry regulations, unified security management via Azure Security Center, enforcement of internal policies with Azure Policy, and provision of independent audit reports.

Azure’s security and compliance features add additional layers to protect businesses’ data and applications from cyber threats.

Azure provides enhanced security through its secure foundation, built-in security controls, and unique intelligence at cloud scale. This includes features like Azure Security Center, Azure Policy, Threat Protection, and compliance offerings, meaning businesses can enhance their cybersecurity posture while gaining real-time threat intelligence and proactive defensive mechanisms through tools like ‘Secure Score’.

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) offer advantages over on-premises systems such as scalability, cost-effectiveness, speed, robust security, disaster recovery capabilities, maintenance, global reach, integration with other Microsoft products, continuous innovation, and environmental friendliness.

These VMs allow businesses to upgrade components at the click of a button (meaning if resources are needed, an upgrade option is readily available), optimise energy efficiency, contribute to sustainability with up to 93% more energy-efficient solutions than on-premises services, and aim for 100% renewable energy usage by 2025.

Azure Resource Manager streamlines infrastructure management by providing a centralised platform for creating, deploying, and managing resources within your Azure environment, without the need for physical servers. Using Azure Resource Manager simplifies operations by reducing the complexity of managing an infrastructure.

Organisations that move to Azure will no longer need physical servers, resulting in reduced costs for equipment. By embracing Azure’s scalable IaaS solutions and pay-as-you-go pricing models, you’ll only be charged for resources used. Azure also offers cost-saving opportunities through options like Azure Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, reducing computer usage costs by up to 65% and providing flexibility to scale resources as per demand, avoiding over-provisioning and unnecessary costs.

Microsoft Azure is a leading AI platform that leverages the growth of AI. Azure’s AI services are used globally by the likes of companies such as UPS, Coca-Cola and Rockwell Automation. Azure boasts a range of different AI services such as:

Azure OpenAI

OpenAI provides businesses access to some of the most advanced AI models available on the market such as GPT4, GPT-3.5 Turbo, Codex, DALL-E and text-to-speech models which can be tailored to any need. It has been designed to be highly customisable to accommodate for any task. Users can integrate these models into applications using REST APIs, Python SDK or Azure OpenAI Studio. This service offers the security and enterprise promise of Azure, ensuring that the AI models are used responsibly and in compliance with Microsoft’s principles for responsible AI use.

Azure AI Search

Azure AI Search, also known as Azure Cognitive Search, is a cloud-based service offering search functionality across a range of applications. Using Microsoft’s advanced AI and machine learning, it provides fast, precise, and personalized search experiences. Azure AI Search uses deep-learning models to understand each search query offering significantly improved results. The platform offers customisable capabilities such as language detection, image analysis and translation allowing a tailored experience.

Azure AI Content Safety

This feature within Azure uses advanced deep learning technology to provide safety against harmful content across various modalities including text, images, and multimodal content. Upon detection, this can filter out

inappropriate content ensuring only appropriate content is available. Organisations can adjust content filters to align with their community guidelines, including the ability to create fully customisable blocklists to enhance content filtering. Azure AI Content Safety adheres to comprehensive security and compliance standards to ensure responsible usage of AI models.

Azure Vision

Azure Vision provides a comprehensive platform for analysing images and videos, equipping developers with ready-to-use models for tasks like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), object detection, and facial recognition. Additionally, Azure Vision offers features like Spatial Analysis, which interprets human presence and movement in physical spaces, and Image Analysis, which identifies objects, colours, activities, and surroundings, generating captions that describe real-world scenarios.

Azure’s IAM adds an extra layer of security and simplifies access management within organisations by using Role-Based Access controls and providing just-in-time privileged access to Azure resources, reducing the risk of excessive permissions.

Azure showcases its robustness through quick recovery from disturbances, from small-scale hardware issues to large-scale regional disruptions. The platform maintains application availability by distributing virtual machines across separate hardware nodes within clusters, known as availability sets and zones. Azure offers many performance optimisation services such as Virtual Machine Scale Sets, which can automatically increase or decrease resources in response to demand ensuring high availability and consistent performance, and Elastic Pools, which are used to manage SQL databases, enabling you to allocate a shared set of resources such as CPU, memory across multiple databases allowing for a cost-effective resource utilisation.

Azure’s hybrid solutions seamlessly integrate with on-premises infrastructure, providing a cohesive and flexible IT environment that leverages the best of both cloud and on-premises resources. By leveraging hybrid solutions, Azure ensures that organisations can maintain their current infrastructure while taking advantage of the scalability and innovation offered via the cloud service.