TAKING YOUR BUSINESS TO MICROSOFT AZURE CLOUD – AND BEYOND
We’ve all heard the benefits of moving to cloud.
There’s the ability to scale resources up and down, a reduction in infrastructure and maintenance costs, easy accessibility, and improved security, compliance and disaster recovery, with your data housed in highly secure data centres.
Gartner has forecast the public cloud market services market to ready US$214 billion this year – up 17.5 percent on 2018 – and says that’s just the beginning. It’s forecasting the growth of cloud services to be nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.
The analyst firm goes on to say that more than a third of companies now see cloud as a top three investing priority.
So the benefits are all there, and demand is running high. But what many companies don’t consider when they’re thinking about cloud are the longer-term benefits.
When you are looking to add additional functionality or cloud-based services into your environment, it’s a lot simpler to integrate those into a cloud platform. That means services like Microsoft Azure – which at 10 years old is a well-established offering – are an ideal platform to add additional services to your organisation, further down the track. And in such a rapidly moving market, where businesses are redefining themselves constantly, being able to rapidly spin up new services as your business needs change, is crucial.
Beyond today
The scalable and secure cloud enabled enterprise-grade applications offered by Microsoft Azure are enabling companies to quickly build, deploy and manage a wide range of applications to support their business.
Moving to Azure is much more than simply lifting your current server workloads and shifting them to the cloud. True, that is one part of the equation – and a first step for many of our clients who use Azure’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings to run Microsoft server products, Linux or other third-party offerings on virtual machines.
While IaaS enables you to outsource your infrastructure and rapidly scale up or down, paying only for what you use, Azure’s Platform-as-a-service goes a step further, providing a complete development and deployment environment, enabling you to create web applications or solutions.
Like IaaS, PaaS includes all the infrastructure, such as servers, storage and networking, but it also includes development tools, business intelligence services, database management systems and so on.
Azure – which is Microsoft’s fastest growing business segment – is an ever-expanding set of cloud computing services enabling to you rapidly add new services to your IT setup.
It already offers more than 100 services to build, deploy and manage applications, whether in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge, and its range of a la carte offerings cover all the key areas a Kiwi business might need, from DevOps to Internet of Things, SAP on Azure to AI, blockchain and big data and analytics. And it’s continuously being added to – case in point: Azure Sphere. Announced in 2018 and due to launch in February 2020, Azure Sphere is a new stack including micro controllers and Azure services to secure edge devices. Another new offering, Azure Lighthouse, enables providers such as Kinetics to deliver more comprehensive and robust management.
Securing your future
Security is routinely listed by our customers as a number one priority for any cloud-based service. Kinetics has done a lot of due diligence to ensure our customers can have complete confidence that Azure is one of the most secure platforms available.
Azure Active Directory provides enterprise-grade identify services, including single sign-on, conditional access and multifactor authentication for greater peace of mind.
Getting a FlightPlan for your journey
With a constant stream of updates and new features, it can be hard keeping up with all the options available on Azure. That’s where partnering with experts like Kinetics comes in.
Our comprehensive FlightPlan IT review service gives you a helicopter view of your business from an IT perspective, identifying where you are now, where you want to go – taking into account your business goals – and how you can leverage IT to get there.
Through our FlightPlan process, our team ensure your IT activities are oriented around your company’s business and strategic goals, thinking about what is possible rather than just keeping the lights on. Because at the end of the day, IT can, and should, be an enabler to your growth aspirations or strategic goals.
Learn more about FlightPlan or get in touch to find out if a FlightPlan is right for your business…
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