6 Reasons Why Microsoft Azure will be Advantageous for SMEs in 2019

Gartner highlighted Microsoft Azure as the leading cloud infrastructure in the year 2017. And it has only become constant since. With more and more businesses of all sizes have started to move to the cloud, providers vie for the top spot. Naturally, keeping the flexibility and benefits of Microsoft Azure in mind, it is easier to see why it has gained a lot of traction in the SMEs business world and cloud storage. Gartner also recognized Microsoft Azure as the leader in the Application Platform as a Service (PaaS), Cloud Storage Services, and Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Small-Medium Enterprises and Microsoft Azure

In short, once you discover what Microsoft Azure really is and how it works, it is not a task to imagine why so many small and medium-sized businesses are willing to use it. Azure has some excellent features and tools that can be used in the best possible way to make the platform highly advantageous for SMEs in the upcoming years.  

Indeed, Microsoft Azure cloud service is the best one for SMEs in 2019 and here's why:

Efficient Across the Board

Speed is critical - especially when it comes to small and medium-sized business. That's one of the best ways to keep ahead in the competitive market. And that's exactly what Azure offers. In fact, Azure offers the speed benefits across three key areas:

• Speed of operation
• Speed of deployment
• Speed of scalability

With Azure training, you can train your employees to keep all of these key functions in place for maximum benefits. When a platform offers efficiency across the board, it gives the organization a competitive edge that's hard to match.

Business Agility

Businesses that use Microsoft Azure have a more efficient and faster development cycle -, especially for on-premises solutions. This also means becoming more iterative and responsive with feedback for application development. Employees with Azure certifications can use the agility benefit to explore the different outcomes of implementing the technology. Doing so enables them to pick the outcome with the maximum relevance to the business objectives. From a financial perspective, a faster product cycle also measures the suitability without setting up complicated infrastructures or an expensive outlay. In short, business agility is much more than simply maintaining standards, especially for SMEs. It is a way SMEs can guarantee faster growth and success.

Integrated Development Environment

SMEs can enjoy a development environment at the Azure platform baked straight in Visual Studios. For businesses that are still in the development phase, this could be a game changer. This feature helps reduce the usual learning curb that naturally comes with moving to a new platform. There are two specific benefits of this:

• There's less chance for mismatching the skills
• Teams can be trained to quickly learn the job and the deployment process

The tight integration of the Microsoft Azure platform demonstrates its flexibility of adapting to the specific requirements of developers. Generally, it is a great benefit that could help a business grow on a daily basis.

Cost Efficiency

Microsoft Azure platform is highly practical when it comes to cost-efficiency. Here are a few cost-related benefits for SMEs:

• No large investments required (as it eliminates the need for building a remote or on-premise datacenter).
• No investment required for software development or dealing with increased workloads.
• Costs associated with warranty renewals and service calls can be avoided.
• Eliminate the cost associated with all the unnecessary sources. Azure bills on a per-second format rounded off at the last minute of usage.

Additional features associated with Azure pricing include:

• Azure Pricing Calculate - Gives you a fair idea of how much cost you will incur for the setup, variables, networking, computing, developer tools, and analytical procedures.
• Azure Reserved VM Instances -  Investing in a reservation gives you a discount on running RIs, which helps you save money.
• Azure Cost Management - Is a SaaS solution that works perfectly for any organization using a multi-cloud strategy.

Security

Microsoft Azure has a very determined approach for security. It follows the standard security model of Diagnose, Detects, Assess, Stabilize, and Close. Additionally, the platform has reliable cybersecurity controls to offer to keep your data completely safe and secure. This could be a major benefit for small to medium-sized businesses that cannot afford to lose data assets.  With the growth in global security threats to the data, it is important to use strong security measures to avoid the risk of business data. All of this can be achieved on the Azure platform without any additional resources.

Disaster Recovery

In continuation of the point discussed above, businesses are getting more proactive and serious about making disaster recovery a high priority. According to the Information Technology Intelligence Consulting survey, around 80% of businesses must have a 99.99% uptime for mission-critical operating systems, hardware, and the main line of business applications to avoid threats.

You can utilize a strong disaster recovery solution with Azure. It allows you to access:

• Multiple locations for data storage - allowing you to deploy a cloud service without any territorial limitations.
• Azure site recovery - a native service that helps keep your important business applications online during any disruption or outage by replicating the desired location from the primary site.
• 3x data replication - any data that you have moved to the cloud on Azure has three copies - wither on a secondary or a single data center.
• Azure Traffic Manager - gives you the access to automate network routing to multiple locations (should be predetermined) in case there's a failure in a specific region.

Bottom Line

When it comes to the IT sector of a small to medium-sized business, the majority is moving to the cloud - some as a whole and others in parts of their IT infrastructure. Cost advantage mobility on virtual devices, and maximizing uptime as some of the most important reasons why this decision is made. You can make this transition smoother and more efficient with Azure training.