Why SMBs need Managed Azure?

Microsoft Azure, formerly known as Windows Azure, is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. It provides a range of cloud services, including those for computer systems, analytics, storage, and networking.

Its flexibility allows users to pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications, in the cloud.

Azure is widely considered both a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Then why would an SMB need a Managed IT Service Provider to manage the platform?

For several years now, specifically since July 2018, Microsoft has categorized Azure cloud services into 18 main product types, making their offering scalable, but also making it so that you really need an internal IT or an MSP to take full advantage of its versatility.

Core Azure Products and Services

Some of the most relevant services, for any small to mid-sized business (and even enterprise levels) could be said to be:

Compute

These services enable a user to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs), containers and batch processing, as well as support remote application access.

Web

This branch of services supports the development and deployment of web applications and offers features for search, content delivery, application programming interface (API) management, notification, and reporting.

Data storage

This category provides scalable cloud storage for structured and unstructured data and supports big data projects, persistent storage (for containers), and archival storage.

Analytics

This is a line of service to provide distributed analytics and storage, as well as features for real-time analytics, big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning, business intelligence (BI), internet of things (IoT) data streams, and data warehousing.

Networking

This group includes virtual networks, dedicated connections and gateways, as well as services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name system (DNS) hosting, and network protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Media and Content Delivery Network (CDN)

These services include on-demand streaming, digital rights protection, encoding and media playback, and indexing.

Hybrid Integration

These are services for server backup, site recovery, and connecting private and public clouds.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

These offerings ensure only authorized users can access Azure services and help protect encryption keys and other sensitive information in the cloud. Services include support for Azure Active Directory and Multifactor Authentication (MFA).

Internet of Things

These services help users capture, monitor, and analyze IoT data from sensors and other devices.

Services include notifications, analytics, monitoring, and support for coding and execution.

Development

This line helps application developers to share code, test applications, and track potential issues.

Azure supports a range of application programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Node.js. Tools in this category also include support for Visual Studio, Software Development Kits (SDKs), and blockchain.

Security

Security products provide the capability to identify and respond to cloud security threats, as well as manage encryption keys and other sensitive assets.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning

These are a wide range of services that a developer can use to infuse machine learning, AI, and cognitive computing capabilities into applications and data sets.

Containers

These services help a company create, register, orchestrate and manage huge volumes of containers in the Azure Cloud, using common platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Databases

This category includes Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings for SQL and NoSQL, as well as other database instances, such as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. It also includes SQL Data Warehouse support, caching, and hybrid database integration and migration features.

DevOps

This line provides project and collaboration tools, such as Visual Studio Team Services, that facilitate DevOps software development processes. It also offers features for application diagnostics, DevOps tool integrations, and test labs for build tests and experimentation.

Migration

This suite of tools helps an organization estimate workload migration costs and perform the actual migration of workloads from local data centers to the Azure cloud.

Mobile

This set of products helps a developer build cloud applications for mobile devices, providing notification services, support for back-end tasks, tools for building APIs, and the ability to couple geospatial (location) context with data.

Management

These services provide a range of backup, recovery, compliance, automation, scheduling, and monitoring tools that can help a cloud administrator manage an Azure deployment.

Azure for Disaster Recovery and Backup

Many organizations use Azure for data backup and Disaster Recovery (DR). In addition, some companies use it as an alternative to their own data center.

Rather than invest in local servers and storage, these organizations choose to run some, or all, of their business applications in Azure.

Azure Reliability

To ensure availability and reliability, Microsoft has Azure data centers located around the world.

Since deployment in 2018, Microsoft Azure services are available in 54 regions, spread across 140 countries. As not all services are available in all regions, Azure users must ensure that workload and data storage locations comply with all prevailing compliance requirements or other legislation.

Why an IT MSP?

As you can see, the multiple services you can use and expand upon within this platform are vast. Do not be intimidated or think this is too expensive. It isn’t.

This is precisely where a competent Managed IT Service Provider, such as Sequentur, comes in.

An MSP already has all the technical knowledge and tools in place to provide a section of services or the complete scope of them to any business of any size, while considering your budget and business goals.

We believe that “one size fits all” is not the right approach, and that is precisely why we have tailor-made IT Solutions for small and mid-sized companies.

The main idea is to have your own professional IT Team right there, with trained engineers who know how to deploy, monitor, and run Azure for you – while you reap all the benefits and scalability.

Get the expertise you need without the cost of hiring your own team. Sequentur saves clients an average of 25% on IT costs while providing an entire team of talented engineers to support your IT goals.

Would you like to achieve more? Call us today.

Tampa Bay Office: (813) 489-4122, Washington D.C. Office: (703) 260-1119