Pros and Cons of Microsoft Azure – Cloud Service for Businesses

In 2017, Gartner declared Microsoft Azure a leader in the Cloud Infrastructure as a service space. In this post we will talk about the pros and cons of Microsoft Azure and whether your business should migrate to the cloud or not.

In 2019, an increasing number of businesses and organizations continued to migrate to the cloud. Microsoft Azure in the same time period gained a lot of traction in the business and cloud storage worlds.

More recently, Microsoft was recognized by Garner as the emerging leader in Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), application platform as a Service (PaaS0 and Cloud Storage Services. 

If you’re still not convinced that Microsoft Azure Cloud Services is the right fit for your business, here are some pros and cons to help you make that big leap.

Pros of Microsoft Azure

Security

  • Microsoft Azure has proven that it has a strong focus on security by following the standard security model of Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Stabilize and Close. Together with strong cybersecurity controls, the model has allowed Microsoft Azure to achieve several compliance certifications which have enabled it to become a leader in IaaS security. 

Not only Azure is a protected platform, but the end-user is also covered under this. The multi-level protection is crucial because security threats are continuing to multiply on a daily basis across the world and they are targeting users and businesses, putting them at a significant data loss risk.

  • Microsoft Azure provides very simple and user-friendly services to help you protect application passwords.

Cost-Effectiveness

  • It is very important for businesses to keep their IT budgets in check when migrating to cloud services. Cost is perhaps one of the reasons why Microsoft Azure is so attractive for many businesses. The pay as you go model of the cloud, allows SMBs to manage their IT budgets better since they can purchase as much as they need.

Moreover, the cloud environment has enabled businesses to launch both their internal apps and customer applications within the cloud which saves significantly on IT infrastructure costs while reducing the need for hardware and maintenance costs. 

High Availability

  • Unlike other services, Microsoft Azure offers high availability and redundancy in their data centers on a very global scale. For this reason, Azure can offer a service level agreement of SLA of 99.95{1f0cc4060f4fe9fc982bbd4bbe2778698630254e28c6e7cd32c637f8f4aaee17} which is almost impossible for businesses to achieve on their own.

Cons of Microsoft Azure

You’ll Need Platform Expertise

  • Azure is different from local servers and requires expertise to ensure that all the moving parts work as efficiently as possible. Even a common mistake made by an IT administrator of a business can create problems.

This is why it is often recommended to outsource cloud management to Microsoft Azure partners such as Henson Group.

Ready to Migrate to Azure?

If your company is looking to migrate to Azure our migration practice helps customers migrate from on-premise VMware/Hyper-V, Colo such as Rackspace, or other clouds like AWS to Microsoft Azure Datacenter or Azure Stack Infrastructures.  

This team also helps clients migrate existing workloads in Azure IaaS to Azure PaaS including SQL Server to Azure SQL Database, SQL SSIS to Data Factory, SQL SSRS/Tableau to PowerBI, Data Warehouses to Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database Tables to Data Lake, and many others.

We have over 17+ years of experience and most of our employees are former Microsoft employees which give us access to the following.

  • Microsoft executives and product groups
  • Code and knowledge not generally available to our competitors

Moreover, we provide a free escalation path to Microsoft Premier Support provided by Microsoft and implementations at a fraction of the cost of our competition charges. 

Get in touch with us today and make the Azure Migration process as smooth as possible for your business.