As this is my first blog in the Microsoft team, I thought I would take a step back and start from the basics with regards to Microsoft Azure and use that as the foundation to build off for future blog posts, as well as a good refresher for everyone!

Before we delve into the exciting world of what Azure is, I think it’s important to first start with asking ourselves the question, what is the Microsoft Cloud? Really, it’s anything that is a cloud service offered by Microsoft with Azure as the cloud platform that underpins it all, whether that is Modern Work with services like Microsoft 365, Teams, and Windows 365, or Security with Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, Intune, and Entra, or whether we are talking about Azure Consumption itself, for things like Windows & Linux Virtual Machines (fun fact, ~50% of Azure VMs are running Linux), SQL Databases, and Azure Virtual Desktop. What can the cloud do for organisations in general?

  • Find efficiencies
  • Lower their upfront costs while having a higher ROI
  • Deploy products and services to the market more rapidly
  • Allowing them the opportunity to innovate more

 

What about Azure though? What is it? In a nutshell, it’s your on-demand data centre. If we think about two keys parts of that sentence, one being “Your”, think about spinning up a data centre, getting the racks and servers in there and getting it all setup, that’s a fair amount of work and possibly a hefty up-front investment, a lot of businesses, especially small businesses (around ~90% of businesses in NZ have 5 or fewer employees) won’t be investing in that. The second key part is “On-Demand”, if we compare that to Microsoft 365 where it’s a flat fee per month per user, Azure is a consumption-based service, so you only pay for what you use, if you use it for a minute, an hour, a day, you only pay for that amount. What that means is you’re only paying for what you need when you need it.

To expand on that in a bit more detail, the Azure Cloud Platform is composed of a globally distributed datacentre infrastructure. It has over 60 regions worldwide and is available in 140 countries. There are more than 200 products within Azure and 6000+ services as part of that; that’s a lot right, more than you might ever need or want, but I think the main takeaway is that there is something for everyone and for every scenario, including how you deploy it, whether that is pure public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud or multi-cloud.

 

 

What about benefits though? What is Azure really doing for my organization? Well, I see 4 key areas:

  1. Scalable & Resilient: Scale your IT needs based on business needs anywhere in the world, allowing you to scale up and down as needed and only pay for those additional resources when they are required. Resiliency is baked into the platform, with ample options to meet your recovery and availability metrics for your workloads (at the time of writing this, based on the published SLAs from Microsoft, the average across all services are 99.93% and the median 99.9% - it’s important to note that most services have different SLAs and there are various ways you can increase these from the base if needed).

  2. Flexible: It offers flexible deployment models, think hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, it provides easy and fast deployment to end users, including how and when you deploy resources, increasing your time-to-value and allowing you to focus more on innovation and automation.

  3. Secure: It provides a secure environment for hosting your IT needs. Below are some key areas, though this is not an exhaustive list by any means:
  • Microsoft has the most compliance and security certifications of any cloud provider.
  • Each tenant is independent of each other, if a breach did occur, it wouldn’t take down the entire data centre as it’s localized to that sole tenant in question.
  • Microsoft spends a lot of money on cyber security, to the tune of one billion dollars (that’s USD) and employs three thousand five hundred dedicated cyber security experts.
  • They have a big focus on red team and blue team exercises, which is dedicated teams whose job it is to be on the good side but act like hackers – they’re constantly trying to find ways to penetrate the services, find ways that real hackers might attack Microsoft so that they can shore up their defenses.
  • Less exciting but still relevant, they have some of the world’s best physical security, securing the building environments themselves but also within those buildings to secure the server environments; to enter a server environment, for example, a person would have to pass through multiple physical layers and provide multiple forms of identification. They would also be scanned for metal in their pockets to make sure that they are not bringing devices in to steal information.
  • When Microsoft employees need elevated access so that they can do maintenance on a service, or so they can investigate a customer support issue, they only have access to exactly the resources they need to access and for only exactly the amount of time that they need it. So, they have just in time and just enough access to do their work, and then they get out, they don't have any standing elevated access that allows them to view customer data.
  1. Cost-effective: I think there are two parts to this, firstly, you only pay for what you use, so that shift from CapEx to OpEx. Secondly, when we think about cost-effective with regards to Azure, you do need to factor in the benefits above (Scalability, Resiliency, Flexibility & Security), because they are most certainly factored into how Azure is priced. There is also the basics which are factored in here, which is the cost to be running the data centre itself (power, cooling, setup, maintenance, etc.), which would be true of your on-premises deployments too, but possibly not factored in when doing a like for like comparison of the two.

To wrap up, some important (and relevant to cost-effectiveness) questions to ask yourself here, are you leveraging all the right programs that you could be? Are you using the right licensing for your workloads? Are you using Reserved Instances (discounted pricing for long-term commitments) for workloads that are on 24/7? Are you using the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) and the Dicker Data Proof of Concept program? If you’ve answered no to any of these, whether it was an estimate or a current customer that is utilizing Azure, please come talk to me or anyone in the Azure team here at Dicker Data to confirm eligibility across these. Likewise, if you’d like to have a more general discussion with us, please reach out!