The Future of Small and Midsize Businesses

Key Highlights

Azure’s Benefits for SMBs

1. Adoption of Azure helps the company manage workload increases in an efficient manner.

2. The decision-making process of the company will be more flexible and agile.

3. Better data to make informed decisions.

4. Reduces costs and helps in managing internal processes.

5. Optimum allocation of resources.

How Microsoft Azure Can Help Your SMB?

The adoption of Cloud Computing has exploded in recent years, and it is easy to understand why. The days when businesses could buy computer hardware and software components with built-in servers are not over yet, but platforms like Microsoft Azure make it easier than ever to provide computer servers and services with just a few clicks. Let us investigate a few benefits of Azure and how it can help your business accelerate things.

Azure: A Major Advantage for Your Business

Scale on Demand

Business needs can change quickly, so you need a platform that makes it easy to adapt to your business needs as they change.

Receiving alerts that your data server is running out of disk space? Or what about a spike in your business intranet due to a recent business acquisition? With just a few clicks, you can have server settings configured in minutes. Azure also provides pre-defined server templates to help get started. Your server can be accessed as a traditional server by providing its IP address and details to the Remote Desktop connection session.

Time and Speed

Microsoft Azure is fast. In today’s world where speed is essential to stay competitive, Azure can help your business in three major areas:

1. Distribution speed

2. Performance speed

3. Deceleration speed (Consider clarifying or removing this point)

Flexibility

The IT environment is constantly evolving, and to help your business keep pace with technological advances, you need a platform that makes adapting easier. Microsoft Azure lets you do this from a single dashboard with a mouse click. With Azure, you can provide a variety of Windows or Linux environments that give your business real flexibility in terms of applications that they can use and support.

Maintainability

It is a one-time effort to build an app or data solution, but companies do not always account for the cost and effort involved in maintaining and expanding the solution. With code-heavy solutions, a lot of time ends up being spent on busy work and keeping integrations up to date — and that’s time and money that could be better used elsewhere. Microsoft simplifies this with a low-code approach, utilizing Data Factory’s prebuilt connectors, which are always updated to ensure you can continue integrating data from hundreds of source and target services as those services keep updating their APIs and integration points.

Secure and Backed-up Email

With Azure, small businesses can access a cloud-based email server (Microsoft Exchange Online) synced with Azure Active Directory for backup and access management. With Exchange Online, you do not need to update your email servers manually to get the latest performance. You have pre-installed antispam and antimalware protection as well as support for up to 50 GB mailboxes each and access to email service from mobile devices.

Backup and Recovery

Azure Backup creates snapshots – real-time photos of your system – to retrieve data and functionality of your cloud services and applications as a time stamp. With Azure, you can set up backups and ensure backup data security by encrypting data and multifactor authentication.

Data and Information Security

You can protect your Azure environment with advanced access management with Azure Active Directory and firewall services. Also, there is the Azure Security Center, which performs continuous security monitoring throughout your Azure environment (a hand-crafted Log Analytics agent that supports hybrid areas) and warns you of inconsistencies and threats and how to fix them. In addition, Azure-based infrastructure supports HIPAA compliance, which means that Azure services are considered suitable for secure storage and processing of protected health information.

Data is pivotal to your company’s success and protecting it is paramount. Cyber security is under increasing scrutiny with high-profile hacking cases receiving widespread coverage. Indeed, hacking costs businesses billions each year and causes often insurmountable trust issues with customers, leading to lost business. Microsoft Azure data centres are secure sites protected by two-tier authentication access. They employ a team 24/7 to work on and react to any potential cyber threats. The Azure Single Sign-on feature means you can set a business-wide password rather than individual passwords if you prefer.

Microsoft Azure is a flexible cloud computing platform that allows businesses to choose from a range of services and supports any operating system language. Azure can be used as a hybrid service too, allowing you to integrate any existing services your business may have on-site which it wants to retain.

The Power of Rapid Migration and Development

Azure offers free migration tools and infrastructure change and offers services (e.g., IoT, AI, machine learning, and blockchain) for rebuilding your legacy apps for such an inefficient migration.

Visual Studio and Continuous Integration

If you run a software or business development team, as you might expect, Azure integrates well with Microsoft Visual Studio. Accepting continuous integration into your software process can help you build and deploy faster, which can increase profits. With Azure, you can quickly set up Build Servers that integrate with Visual Studio and perform processes that automatically start building, testing, and uninstalling your app when developers enter the code! With Visual Studio and Azure, you can easily add or remove building materials that complement your unique software delivery processes.

IoT (Internet of Things)

The IoT industry is growing rapidly. Mobile devices and watches all connect and exchange information with the cloud. Azure IoT Hub supports IoT and includes features that allow you to create and use predictive math solutions and process real-time data from millions of IoT devices.

Azure Data Services

1. Databases

2. Analytics workloads

3. Machine learning

Data is the foundation of them all, and Microsoft’s got everything covered. Whether you favour a SQL Server or an open-source alternative, you will find support in Azure Data Services. Azure Cosmos DB provides a singular, globally distributed, multi-model database supporting different APIs and data formats. For end users, it is easy to adopt and build scalable mission-critical applications without the worry of managing infrastructure, capacity, and integrations. By contrast, other providers split all of these out into different database services.

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