Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services intended to help your organization meet business challenges. It provides freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favourite tools and framework.
With Azure, services such as data analytics, data warehousing, IoT solutions, Dev and Test ops, can all exist in a managed, secure and scalable environment.
Azure offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for whether you want to build apps and websites, or store, back up and analyse data.
Microsoft recommends that organisations move their data and infrastructure to Azure using their proven cloud migration plan. This cloud migration steps includes four broad steps:
To establish a complete migration plan, a thorough assessment of your workloads will provide a guide for which databases need to be migrated to the cloud in addition to the quantity to be migrated.
If an organisation intends to migrate all their on-premise workloads to Azure cloud services, an initial assessment pass with the intent of consolidating or decommissioning legacy workloads can help reduce the overall number of database workloads needing to be migrated.
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service offering in Azure with which you can create a database with most of the functionality of running your own SQL Server in a virtual machine, but without having to worry about operating the virtual machine part of it.
The associated maintenance and administration overhead disappears as Microsoft Operations takes care of all the underlying operating system and application for you.
By using Azure security and management services to govern and monitor your cloud applications, organisations can run a secure and well-managed cloud environment. Organisations can start and continue using these services during their migration to ensure a consistent experience.
The Azure cloud can also be managed using Azure Cost Management to control cloud spend with transparency and accuracy. This solution can be used to allocate, trim and monitor cloud costs.
Organisations can take advantage of offers from Azure, such as Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, and continue right-sizing your migrated virtual machines to your workloads for improved value.
The Azure Security Center for unified cloud security management advances threat protection across your hybrid cloud workloads. It also allows for full visibility into and control over the security of cloud applications in Azure. With this service, organisations can quickly detect and respond to threats, and reduce exposure by enabling adaptive threat protection.
Azure Backup is a cost-efficient, built-in solution that is easy to deploy. The solution can be set up in a few simple steps and is pay-by-use with no additional data restoration costs. By backing up apps in the Azure cloud, organisations can avoid costly business disruptions, meet compliance goals, and help secure your cloud application data against ransomware and human error.
Track the health and performance of cloud apps, infrastructure, and data with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights. This service allows for the easy collection of data from sources and the ability to gain rich insights. For example, gauge CPU disk and memory utilization for your VMs, and view applications and network dependencies across multiple VMs.
These cloud monitoring tools can be combined with existing service management solutions.
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