Azure and Its Answer to Latency and Data Sovereignty Concerns

30th January 2018

With so much investment riding on the Cloud, most major stakeholders are quick to adopt applications and services on demand – essentially the provisioning of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources over the internet as a service. Forrester has predicted that the cloud computing market will increase from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion by 2020, with a year-to-year growth of over 20 percent. Among the major stakeholders is Microsoft Azure – Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform.

Azure Cloud as a service is associated with a disruptive set of new software delivery models – ones that work on economies of scale. Cloud is synonymous with on-demand delivery of what is commonly known as the SPI stack – SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (IT infrastructure as a service). This stack is constantly evolving with added selection of delivery models and is now increasingly referred to as XaaS (everything as a service)

Microsoft currently has 42 Azure regions, more than any other cloud provider. This gives Azure a strategic advantage over competitors like Amazon as they can deliver locally hosted resources that allow for in-country data governance. Customers have long used reasons like latency and data sovereignty to not move to the Cloud. With local presence in countries like Africa that has over 500,000 Cloud users, a key focus for all customers would be to start planning and testing what workloads they would deploy when it is available in country.

Some organizations use Azure for data backup and disaster recovery. In addition, some organizations use Azure as an alternative to their own data centres. Rather than investing in local servers and storage, these organizations choose to run some, or all, of their business applications in Azure.

Here are some of the benefits of deploying solutions on Azure:

• • Collaboration: Solutions on the Cloud lower the barrier to adoption across the value chain of the Enterprise and facilitates collaboration across supply chains. The idea of a Virtual Enterprise Network becomes plausible through shared workspaces on the cloud.

• • Scalability: Solutions as a Service is also an excellent way to test pilot projects and then have them delivered on demand, putting the controls directly in the hands of business owners for decisions on size of investments, scalability etc.

• • Mitigates risk from silos: Breaks away from information silos that hinder deeper inter departmental collaboration across the Enterprise.

• • Cost Benefits: Solutions on Azure radically reduce risk and start-up expenses. From an Enterprise perspective, technology on the cloud means a whole new landscape in terms of a business model and the ability to orchestrate cloud services to increase or decrease IT resources based on specific requirements. This translates to significant cost savings to SMBs who can circumvent big initial investments, orchestrate processes on the cloud, train on these processes and then pay as they go.

• • Elasticity: Agility and elastic scalability or rapid scale up/ pare down is a key attraction for businesses which are looking to cut back on IT costs and distribute investments to their core business activities.

• Focus on core business: By reducing infrastructure and resources related to deploying software and tools on premise, Enterprises can concentrate on driving operational efficiency for their main business.

With Azure, Office 365 & Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s cloud is growing its reach with new regions. Microsoft’s latest offering, Dynamics 365 could also be the answer to boost organizational productivity. Dynamics 365 brings the best of both Microsoft’s CRM and ERP cloud services into a single suite with productivity apps and predictive intelligence and analytics. To know more about this from us, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, contact us on marketing@levtechconsulting.com