Earlier this year, RightScale® Inc., a recognized leader in enterprise universal cloud management, released the results of its annual survey of more than 1,000 corporate cloud users: the 2017 State of the Cloud Survey. Among its findings is the continued ascendancy of Microsoft Azure. According to RightScale®:
“Overall Azure adoption grew from 20 to 34 percent of respondents, while AWS stayed flat at 57 percent of respondents. Google also grew from 10 to 15 percent to maintain third position. Azure also reduced the AWS lead among enterprises; Azure increased adoption significantly from 26 percent to 43 percent while AWS adoption in this group increased slightly from 56 percent to 59 percent.”
Why Are More Businesses Choosing Azure?
The results of the RightScale survey came as no surprise to businesses which are already using and know the benefits of Azure for their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) needs. Those benefits include the following 5:
1. Azure Lets You Integrate Seamlessly with Other Microsoft Tools
Businesses which rely on other popular Microsoft services, like Outlook, Office 365 and SharePoint, are able to integrate Azure’s cloud services with those tools efficiently and seamlessly. In addition, Azure utilizes the same virtual machines (VMs) that businesses use on-premises, including both Windows and Linux. For businesses which have struggled to align disparate services and tools, Azure represents a refreshing ease of integration, one which saves them both time and money. That’s a substantial advantage, one which explains Azure’s increasing market share.
2. Azure Lets You Partner with an Industry Leader
According to a recent survey from The Virtualization Practice, a majority of users reported that Microsoft’s reputation as “a trusted industry leader” was a significant consideration in their decision to choose Azure. The Microsoft brand in unequivocally among the most trustworthy and reliable among Fortune 500 companies. That stellar reputation has been powered by widely used tools like Xbox, Skype and Bing, the popularity of which is driving an increasing number of companies to Azure. The rationale is simple: because other Microsoft tools are reliable, using Azure just makes sense.
Equally important, Microsoft’s reliability extends to its Azure services. For example, it’s supported by an increasingly larger number of managed data centers (currently, there are 19 global data centers in 19 regions). You’ll also benefit from 99.95% availability and 24/7 tech support.
3. Azure Lets You Customize Solutions to Meet Your Specific Needs
One of the benefits of Azure’s leadership position in both IaaS and PaaS is your ability to use it in ways that are particularly beneficial to your business. For example, adopting Azure’s IaaS services, you can use—and pay for—only those services you need. Azure’s PaaS services will let you build only the apps and software you need, without having to buy or maintain the underlying infrastructure. This means that you can customize your own cloud software (like Office 365) to meet your business’s individual needs and solve business-specific problems more efficiently.
4. Azure Provides Strong Open-Source Analytics Support
With Azure, your business will benefit from managed SQL and NoSQL data services and embedded support. This will enable you to dig deep into data to better understand and continually improve business processes and improve data-driven decision making. You’ll also have access to Azure’s powerful analytics tool, HDInsight, which Microsoft aptly describes as:
“…the only fully-managed cloud Apache Hadoop offering that gives you optimized open-source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, MapReduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and Microsoft R Server backed by a 99.9% SLA. [You can] deploy these big data technologies and ISV applications as managed clusters with enterprise-level security and monitoring.”
5. Azure Provides a Continual Stream of Exciting, New Releases
Azure continually updates its offerings, providing new services to augment the robust functionality it offers. Recent releases are especially beneficial to users. For example, there’s Azure Advisor, which provides personalized recommendations based on individual user needs. Two additional recent releases, Site Recovery and Backup, in combination help businesses create a powerful and cost-effective business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.
Conclusion
Cloud-based services like Microsoft Azure will help your business protect data, streamline processes and cut costs. To create a comprehensive cloud strategy, you also need to select a hosting provider which understands both your company and a wide array of cloud-based services, and which can give you the guidance you need to make informed decisions. To learn more about the ways our cloud, managed hosting, web hosting, and security and compliance services can help you achieved your business objectives and grow your business, contact us today.