Running your company's digital infrastructure on a public cloud, a product known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has become a powerful and cost-effective solution in recent years. The cloud offers many universal benefits, including unmatched uptime, scalability, and customization. Many businesses find that moving to an IaaS helps drive productivity, optimize data, and, most importantly, promote financial growth.
Moving your business's digital infrastructure to the cloud can seem like a significant change, but it's becoming a common choice for many companies. The long-term benefits and savings of using an IaaS solution can be massive.
The first significant advantage of cloud infrastructure is the much lower upfront costs. There is no expensive hardware or additional real estate required, and you'll only pay for the services you use. If you have a start-up, building on the cloud will allow your business to spend more time and money on things that matter, like research, development, and marketing.
On top of that, an IaaS solution can provide businesses with a level of flexibility and scalability that is difficult to achieve with traditional on-premises infrastructure. With the ability to quickly provision and de-provision resources on-demand, companies can respond to changing market conditions, and customer needs in real-time. This ability is particularly beneficial for businesses that experience seasonal fluctuations or unexpected growth.
If your company currently operates an on-premise data center, it's understandable that you have concerns about the financial aspects of transitioning to the cloud. However, I encourage you to take a step back and consider the recurring costs of maintaining that type of infrastructure—things like dedicated IT technicians, maintenance, and power consumption can quickly add up. These expenses will increase when it comes time to expand, replace, or upgrade your hardware.
Even worse, what happens when your on-premise servers go down? In addition to the expensive parts and maintenance, you're also looking at irritated users and potential lost revenue. Cloud-based infrastructure is much more stable and typically has redundancies, meaning downtime is almost non-existent.
Now that you understand cloud-based infrastructure's core concepts and benefits, let's talk about our favorite IaaS provider: Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft has leveraged its always-expanding global data centers to create one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world. It has more than 100 data centers in over 50 regions, allowing it to provide high availability and low latency and ensuring that applications and services are fast and reliable. With Azure, users can access their resources and applications from anywhere using any device.
The seamless integration with other Microsoft products makes Azure the top choice for companies already using Microsoft software. For example, businesses already using Office 365 for their admin tasks can easily integrate their back-end O365 data tables with Azure.
Azure even allows users to create virtual machines, storage accounts, and virtual networks, which can host and run applications, store data, and connect to other resources. It also has applications for development, such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Functions, which companies can use to build and deploy cloud-native applications.
Security is always a concern, Azure has you covered. It offers a range of security and compliance features, including Azure Security Center and Azure Information Protection, to help businesses protect their data and applications. It also provides monitoring and analytics tools, such as Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics, to help companies gain insight into the performance of their applications and services.
For companies that already have on-prem data centers and are still hesitant to fully transition to the cloud, Azure has comprehensive Hybrid Cloud capabilities. This option gives companies full access to Azure's suite of tools and services without abandoning their existing infrastructure.
With all that being said, Microsoft Azure's pay-as-you-go pricing model means you only pay for the services you use. There are no hidden fees or surprise charges, and virtually everything is available on demand.
So, if you're ready to make the leap onto the cloud, don't hesitate to reach out to us at Hypershift! We are here and ready to help guide you on your journey.