Being located centrally, yet being present globally is the unspoken rule at most organizations, and hence, to maintain their success, these organizations have put all their faith into Cloud Solutions, and have been reaping dividends.
One of the major proponents of Cloud services in the world today, is Microsoft. With AZURE, their cloud-based Application platform, providing users a Cloud Operating System, integration with .NET services, and database services (SQL Azure), Microsoft has turned the tide in its favor by giving its users a plethora of cloud-based benefits to enjoy.
So, let’s take a look into the Azure framework and the assurance that it provides to users worldwide.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Azure, launched in February 2010, is Microsoft’s cloud-computing infrastructure and platform. Owing to its robust nature, Azure can be used as both PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service). Most cloud services provided by other organizations mainly serve as an IaaS, which means that companies can gain access to infrastructure (Physical Hardware – power, networking and cooling) present in a data center. Azure provides the infrastructure facility as well as serving as a Platform to develop, deploy and manage applications. As mentioned above, Azure offers customizable Cloud OS, database, web servers and coding environments, in addition to integration with other Microsoft services like Visual Studio and .NET platforms.
Since February 2010, Azure has gone through a variety of changes and is now equipped to serve a range of diverse requests.
• Building Websites: Developing a site while making use of a variety of web application and launch frameworks(asp.net) or open source options like WordPress.
• Virtual Machines: If one requires additional computing capacity but doesn’t wish to overcrowd their own datacenter, they can use Azure services to run virtual machines on the cloud that house either Windows or Linux OS.
• Mobile services: Azure employs features that radically quicken mobile application development. Coupled with it being open source (and Windows removing the mandatory requirement of having a “live” profile to access Microsoft applications), authentication is achieved through other Social Media channel accounts.
• Big Data: Azure can also be used to provide a platform for data warehousing and improving business analytics through BI (Intelligence) solutions involving enormous data amounts (Exabytes, Petabytes).
