How to save with Microsoft Azure
Businesses around the world have adjusted their priorities to enable remote work and are now investing in smart ways to prepare for recovery and future growth. To achieve this, many business leaders have adopted a cloud strategy to help them optimise costs and improve efficiencies.
There is a massive uptake in Microsoft Azure infrastructure, it can help businesses improve cash flow, achieve cost savings, increase operational efficiencies and unify security and management. More companies trust and build services on Azure to run their business-critical workloads and support their customers.
With Azure there is no need to provision new hardware, to ensure that users have access to desktops and apps they need to work from anywhere, businesses can spin up and scale virtual desktops quickly with Windows Virtual Desktop.
Windows Virtual Desktop delivers the best Windows 10 and Office 365 virtual desktop experience with support for multi-session. More importantly, one only pays for the infrastructure that you use and save money by turning off machines when they are not in use.
In addition to virtual desktops, employees need access to resources across on-premises and the cloud. With Azure, one can quickly extend and expand your on-premises virtual private network (VPN) solution with Azure VPN Gateway. It can be provisioned quickly and scale up and down easily.
The Azure network is designed to withstand sudden changes in resource utilisation and can easily manage peak utilisation periods.
Avoid costly disruptions
To ensure data and applications are fully protected from business disruptions, many businesses are taking a closer look at their backup and disaster recovery strategy. With just a few clicks, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery lets customers easily backup their data and applications to the cloud, and quickly deploy cloud-based replication, failover, and recovery processes.
Also, to ensure reliable connectivity, customers are using Azure Virtual WAN with supported partner SD-WAN devices to connect remote branch offices to on-premises and public cloud where applications and data are hosted.
Azure Virtual WAN routes traffic from the closest network location to the branch office over Microsoft’s dedicated global network to its destination, providing fast and reliable connectivity at scale.
Protect against cyberattacks
With the dramatic increase in digital infrastructure to enable remote work, there has been an increase in cybercrime. Azure Security Centre provides a unified view of the security state of all your cloud and on-premises workloads and gives you security recommendations.
Azure Web Application Firewall and Azure DDoS Protection protect your web workloads with zero trust security including verifying identity on every access and ensuring your networks are correctly segmented.
Migrate to the cloud and save money
Businesses are moving to the cloud to reduce capital expenditure, realise cost savings and speed up time to value. With offers including Azure Hybrid Benefit and free extended security updates, Azure is five times cheaper than AWS to migrate Windows Server and SQL Server workloads.
In addition, there are free migration tools to reduce migration costs and accelerate the migration journey. The Azure Migration Program also offers guidance and best practices.
Modernise on-premises infrastructure
Many customers keep certain workloads on-premises to meet regulatory requirements, address latency issues, or maximise existing investments. In this case, customers can take advantage of cloud innovation by modernising their on-premises infrastructure and increase efficiency.
For example, Azure Stack HCI lets customers consolidate on-premises virtualised applications on cloud-connected, hyper-converged infrastructure to access the best price-performance for storage and compute. Azure Stack Hub helps customers build and deploy cloud-native applications on-premises and run their own private, autonomous cloud – connected or disconnected – from Azure.
Optimise costs
Azure offers many ways for customers to optimise their costs. Azure Cost Management + Billing give customers free tools to monitor and analyse cloud spend, set budget and spending alerts, and allocate cloud costs across teams.
Azure Advisor helps businesses optimise cloud resource utilisation with personalised recommendations. Offers such as Azure Spot Virtual Machine combined with Azure Reservations let customers save up to 90 percent over pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure services with pre-paid reservation pricing or utilising unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts.
Adopt Microsoft Azure more rapidly to enable remote work, optimise costs, increase efficiency and innovate.
