In addition to AWS, Microsoft Azure is one of the largest and most well-known cloud computing platforms worldwide. This highly scalable cloud service provides maximum flexibility when deploying IT infrastructures and services. Customers from all over the globe put their faith in Microsoft and use the cloud to provision resources like storage, servers, infrastructure (IaaS), platforms (PaaS), applications (SaaS), and networks and apps on demand.
Many other vendors and services are also supported and made available to customers via the Azure Marketplace.
The biggest benefit for companies: Having an own data centre isn’t really necessary as everything IT can be procured from the cloud.
Enormous data volumes require increasing storage and CPU resources. The result is that data centres constantly need to be updated and investment costs can spiral out of control.
Microsoft Azure makes it possible for customers to procure resources as and when they need them allowing additional memory and CPU resources to be added during peak periods and resources that are no longer needed to be easily removed. On demand provisioning gives companies the highest levels of flexibility and reduces investment costs.
Microsoft Azure is also the first choice for developers who can quickly and easily set up and manage development environments.
To ensure that applications and data are protected from data centre outages, Microsoft has created availability zones. Each zone consists of at least one data centre. Three separate zones are used in all regions and these are physically separated from each other. Zone-redundant services replicate your applications and data across availability zones to protect against individual sources of error. The success proves that Microsoft was right. With an uptime SLA of 99.99% for VMs, Azure is an industry leader.
New: Since 2019, Microsoft offers cloud services from Swiss data centres. The Microsoft Cloud (consisting of Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 ) is therefore also available from Swiss data centres.
In addition, Azure complies with strict security and data protection policies plus many international and industry-specific compliance standards such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2, as well as country-specific standards such as IRAP in Australian, G-Cloud in the UK and MTCS in Singapore.
companies that reserve Azure VM instances (RIs), can save up to 82% in costs (compared to the prices for use-based payment). Terms are between one and three years for virtual Windows and Linus computers (VMs). Reserved Azure instances can of course be switched or cancelled at any time should business requirements change.
Bechtle is a long-standing Microsoft Gold and Silver partner. With 47 Competence Centres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we offer companies sound expert knowledge for their IT projects.