Azure is made up of three main pillars: Network, Compute and Storage and is commonly viewed as providing ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ (IaaS, e.g Azure Virtual Networks) and ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Platform’ (IaaP, e.g. Azure SQL) capabilities. 

Rather than investing in local servers and storage, businesses might choose to host their applications through Microsoft Azure in order to enhance their existing operations, particularly as it offers excellent integration with existing tools and technologies. The opportunities presented by cloud computing are wide-ranging and typical use cases for Azure include hosting databases in the cloud, as well as backup storage and disaster recovery, in order to reduce or replace traditional on site servers. 

Adopting Azure not only has organizational benefits, but the pay-per use model means organisations can create scalable applications on a need basis, reducing unnecessary costs.

What alternatives are available?

Like Microsoft, Google (via its Cloud Platform, or GCP) and Amazon (via its Web Services, AWS) make up the top three Cloud providers, according to Gartner. Also providing sizeable infrastructure in this manner are firms such as Alibaba, Oracle and IBM, and many smaller players in the market also offering differentiation to this top six.

Does Datactics offer Cloud-Based solutions?

Datactics has significant experience in deploying our platform to the cloud with both Azure and AWS, the two main environments chosen by our clients. If you are seeking to leverage the power of cloud-enabled data management, please just drop us a line.