The journey to the cloud for every organization is unique and very much contrived to the specifications of the enterprise. The journey, or rather the way it is undertaken can depend on a number of factors, such as the history of the enterprise, the culture that exists inside of it, the product or service it offers, and/or the goals that drive its efforts to transfer to the cloud. Regardless of the specifics, each organization has a purpose to be on the cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as a cloud platform, understands the desire behind the journey; optimizing the features it offers to ease said journey for every organization, no matter where they come from initially.
Azure implementation, which is indirectly optimized by the integral elements of Azure itself, requires an understanding of the key features that Azure offers in terms of cloud services, and as a platform. An Azure certification assists with a lot of the required learning, providing both enterprise teams, as well as individuals with the tools of the cloud migration and operation trade, with respect to MS Azure.
Azure is sure to bring about a very fundamental change in the way an enterprise operates, due to the integral functions, as well as the ideology that the platform brings with it, which is backed by the Microsoft functionality of many years, as well as the research and development by the firm. In this article, we will be discussing the common Azure implementation elements which organizations must instill, in order to take their operations on to the cloud platform. Additionally, we will also be talking about how MS Azure training will help enterprises get their teams up to speed on Azure technologies, to enable and potentially streamline any future updates.
To that end; following are the primary topics with respect to Azure implementation that enterprises need to learn about.
- Governance
- Architecture
- Operations and Application Development
- Service Management
Now, let’s have a brief overview of all the elements.
Microsoft Azure Governance
Microsoft Azure provides administrators and teams the ability to control a number of security options, in order to continually meet the deployment requirements of the enterprise. Broadly speaking, cloud governance on the Azure platform means the decision-making criteria, policies and processes that are involved in the architecture, planning, deployment, acquisition, management and operation of the cloud platform and services.
In order to create a strategy for Azure governance in the cloud, the technologies, processes and people need to be identified and recognized. This will assist the IT teams to create frameworks which consistently support the business needs of the enterprise.
Architecture
An extension of the governance set of services, the architecture here refers to resource governance scaffold, comprising of a set of features that allow governance and management of the resources.
As part of the architecture, Azure offers the following unique features, all of which are integral to the management and operation of the aforementioned services and resources:
- Enterprise Security
- Data protection and threat management
- Identity management (Azure Active Directory)
- Connectivity
- Application Design
The Azure architecture services are meant to give the teams operating the resources in the cloud a measure of control over their tasks, and enable them to streamline the development and deployment of the new services and applications, without having to resort to third-party systems. Training teams on Azure technologies will allow them to better govern the resources at their disposal.
Operations and Application Development
Any enterprise operating in the cloud is bound to have a number of distributed services and applications constantly running in the cloud environment. These services and applications are essentially complex and intricate bundles of software that have a number of moving parts to them. When we speak of the typical production environment, the ability to track the systems are used by the team members and individual users, as well as trace the utilization of the resources is invaluable.
All of the above information can be used to detect and rectify any issues and prevent any problems from occurring in the future. And, this functionality is part of the Azure operations compendium, which also allows for a number of application development monitoring, allowing companies to keep a strict eye on all the resources being used to develop and deploy applications as well as their service or product.
IT Service Management
IT service management is one of the most vital aspects of streamlined delivery and operations within an enterprise. And, when we factor in the cloud, efficient service integration and management of the cloud resources becomes a point of constant attention. The only difference between traditional service management and what IT teams have to deliver in the cloud, is that the product teams will be deploying and operating their items at a greater pace, which the service management fabric will have to keep up with to ensure consistent delivery and seamless functionality across processes.
IT service management in the cloud consists of the following integral facets:
- Problem management
- Incident management
- Configuration and asset management
- Capacity management
- Change management
- Patch and update management
- Service-level management
ITSM is one of the more important areas of consideration when it comes to training your teams on Azure technologies. This is due to service management being the backbone of the organizational functionality in the cloud, and it having a central role in ensuring that all the service are running at their optimal capacity.
Cloud computing holds tremendous promise for organizations and bringing about change in terms of Azure implementation will allow your enterprise to function at its best, while also ensuring continuous delivery courtesy of the unique features.