Comprehensive Guide to Moving to Microsoft Azure Cloud

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Every business utilizes technology, including specialized software, which requires technology infrastructure. Companies’ infrastructure includes servers, storage, firewalls, switches, and connectivity, all backed by robust security to operate in today’s technology-heavy competitive business landscape. All this technology infrastructure is critical to having tremendous uptime, optimal performance, and adaptability. As your business needs change, so too does your technology infrastructure.

• What is the Microsoft Azure?
• Why Microsoft Azure Cloud is right for most businesses
• 4 Big Reasons to move to Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Scalability in Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Details about scaling in Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Backups and Restores in Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Benefits of Nexigen’s managed cloud team

The Azure cloud platform comprises more than 200 Data Centers and over 300 software products and cloud services designed to solve today’s technology challenges and create your future technology infrastructure.

Azure Cloud reduces infrastructure management costs, improves performance, and greatly enhances your technology resiliency. Azure allows you to build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.

Quick Facts:

• Microsoft’s original name for “Azure” was Project Red Dog 
• Microsoft Azure Cloud currently exists in 140 Countries and Counting. Azure has roughly 54 regions worldwide with 200 data centers and counting. 
• Almost half of Microsoft Azure Cloud Energy Comes from Solar, Hydropower, and Wind.

Redundancy – The Microsoft Azure platform has an advantage in almost every scenario regarding the redundancy of its infrastructure. This would be impossible to replicate in an on-premise server environment without spending millions of dollars. 

In the event of a server failure, the next server in the rack can pick up the workload without skipping a beat. 

If the entire server rack fails, the workload can be sent to the next rack. 

If the entire data center fails, then the workload can be shifted to the following data center, if a whole region of data centers fails, then it can be moved over to an alternate region, and finally, if, for some reason, the entire United States Azure infrastructure went offline, then your workloads can still operate in other globally available datacenters.

On-premise power outages – If a server is on-premise, you are beholden to the power it provides. All of your work stops if power is dropped (without a generator onsite). 

In Azure, this is a non-issue. If the power at your facility drops, you can always do your work from home, Starbucks, the library, or anywhere that can provide an internet connection. Work doesn’t have to stop just because the power has.

On-premise Internet Outage – If the power is on but the internet is not, your remote workers cannot do their jobs. Azure solves this by, again, having more redundant internet connections that can rival most ISPs.

Microsoft’s Azure workloads are incredibly scalable. If it’s determined that a server’s resources are overly taxed, then a new, more robust virtual server can take its place with very minimal downtime (minutes). 

The same scalability can also work in reverse, if a server is under-utilized, it can be switched out with a more cost-effective virtual server. 

When dealing with a physical environment, this can require a bit more work, especially when discussing expanding an existing server’s resources. This is due to a hard limit of the physical host itself. Eventually, you run out of resources to give to a virtual server. This does not happen in Azure.

Genuine cloud scale: Applications are designed to run on thousands of technology nodes, reaching scales that aren’t possible in traditional data centers. 

Scaling automatically, either on a schedule or in response to changes in your load. 

Scaling out may be more cost-effective than scaling up. Running several small VMs can cost less than a single large VM. 

Horizontal scaling can also improve resiliency by adding redundancy. If an instance goes down, the application keeps running.

Azure Backup allows companies to break free from vendor lock-in and long-term support contracts. Azure alleviates these concerns by offering a robust backup product that does not require any resources on the production servers. This removes the pain of backup overhead that can be seen in products like Veeam. 

The time it takes to restore a virtual server in Azure is far above anything offered by today’s on-premise products. Instead of taking hours to restore production data, Azure can restore it in minutes since it is not beholden to internet speeds or possible internal network slowness. This will also allow your employees to keep working as the bandwidth will not be consumed by an ongoing restore. 

All of the features that come with Azure backup do not come at a high price. Azure Backup is more cost-efficient than almost any enterprise backup solution per GB, and its performance can best all of them.

Nexigen has the benefit of being a cloud solution and  cybersecurity firm, allowing for unmatched ability to combat every cyber threat while building your infrastructure. 

Nexigen provides complete visibility in a fully managed or co-managed practice allowing you to grow your infrastructure reliably and securely!

Experience – Thousands of azure migration projects completed on time and to the client’s requirement. 

Innovation – Hundreds of innovative improvements to client environments allow for improved costing, uptime, optimized performance, and adaptability.

 Execution – Highest quality project implementation specialist on the market with unmatched project management.

We are always available – Part of what makes our managed security so exceptional is that we are always available.

Please reach out to learn more from our Microsoft Azure Cloud team. Our Azure Cloud experts can help you with the tools and frameworks of your choice.