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These days, more and more businesses are making a switch to the cloud.According to research studies, 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service.Moreover, the public cloud service market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023 worldwide.No matter what your company’s needs are, Microsoft Azure can meet them. Many top websites across different industries, including Ikea, MSN, and Duckduckgo, use its hosting services.
Given that, it is not surprising that Microsoft Azure’s revenue is growing. Statistics show that it rose from $880 million in 2015 to $13 billion by 2019.
In this article, you will learn more about the benefits of hosting your website on Microsoft Azure.
What Is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a public cloud platform that provides over 200 products and cloud services.
It supports multiple IT solutions, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). They can have multiple purposes, from virtual computing and storage to networking and analytics. Most importantly, they allow companies to make a switch from their on-premise servers to hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Microsoft Azure helps companies drive innovation and bring new solutions to life.
With this platform, you can manage your storage, databases, virtual machines, and other computing resources with greater efficiency and scalability.
It allows you to develop, run, and manage applications both on-premises and across multiple cloud infrastructures.
Another benefit of Microsoft Azure is that it is highly customizable. It allows you to use the tools and frameworks of your choice.
That way, you can solve your company’s current challenges and update your IT infrastructure in the future.
Microsoft Azure automatically groups websites into Web Hosting Plans. Plans are created for each collection of sites in your subscription, classified by website mode and region. Pricing tiers adapt to different performance characteristics, storage quotas, and other features.
Now that you know the basics of Microsoft Azure, it is time to see some of its most distinct benefits.
#1 Enhancing Backups with Disaster Recovery
According to statistics, over 50% of companies experience an unforeseen interruption. Moreover, 81% of these interruptions caused companies to be closed.
Moreover, 40% of businesses that suffer a major IT disaster go out of business within one year.
That is exactly why having a detailed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan is essential.
Another research found that 96% of businesses with a disaster recovery solution in place fully recover operations.
Microsoft Azure can make the process easier. It offers an end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution that is simple, secure, scalable, and, above all, affordable.
The disaster recovery solution integrates with both online and on-premises data protection solutions. That way, companies can recover workloads and business services timely and systematically in case of service disruption, theft, or data corruption.
Microsoft Azure can back up your data in almost any language and from any location. Above all, it supports all operating systems. Most importantly, with Azure, you determine the frequency and extent of your backup schedule.
The Azure backup and disaster recovery solution is cloud-native and simple to architect. As such, it offers ease of deployment, minimizes downtime with dependable recovery, and reduces infrastructure costs.
Microsoft Azure stores three copies of your data in different locations in a data center. It creates another three copies in a remote Azure data center. That way, you do not need to worry about losing your data. That way, it minimizes onsite maintenance and reduces your capital investments and operational costs.
#2 Ensuring Greater Data Security
With the rise of sophisticated cybersecurity threats, online data security remains companies’ greatest concern.
According to statistics, the most common cyberattacks experienced by U.S. companies are phishing (38%), network intrusion (32%), and inadvertent disclosure (12%).
Fortunately, with Microsoft Azure, you can be confident that your company’s data is in safe hands.
Azure offers multilayered security across data centers, infrastructures, and operations. Microsoft invests more than $1 billion in research and development and has more than 3,500 experts monitoring user data.
Additionally, Azure offers a wide range of security options, such as the encryption of links and DDoS protection.
Given that, it is not surprising that most U.S. government institutions use Microsoft Azure for their cloud computing needs.
#3 Helping Businesses Reduce Costs
When moving to the cloud, you will still need routers, load balancers, and other physical services. You will also need to hire an in-house IT team and offer Microsoft Azure Certifications. That way, you ensure the best performance of your cloud IT infrastructures.
However, Microsoft Azure helps you reduce costs in multiple ways.
For starters, you decide when you get your IT resources. With Microsoft Azure, you can get a server in less than 20 minutes. That depends on your preferred configuration.
Second, you define your pace of innovation. Microsoft Azure has the Azure SQL Data warehouse that helps your business create and run data warehouses.
Third, as mentioned above, the platform’s scalable architecture enables the flexibility to automatically scale up or down based on your company’s demands. You do not need any additional hardware investments.
Finally, Microsoft Azure operates based on a pay-as-you-go approach when charging users. Namely, your business pays at the end of each month for the resources used earlier that month. Its support is available to all plans.
#4 Improving Website and App Scalability
Irrespective of its sector, every business has busier and slower periods. They may vary daily or appear seasonally. Do not wait for traffic growth to take down your application or website. To maintain operational efficiency and keep customers satisfied, you need to welcome these changes prepared.
For example, many online businesses could not keep up with the sudden influx of website traffic during the Coronavirus pandemic. Their infrastructures often collapsed, leaving customers frustrated. While investing in new servers to handle the load may help, it takes a lot of time and money.
Precisely because of that, it is essential to build a scalable cloud infrastructure. Scalability is your system’s ability to automatically match changing industry demands. In the cloud, this solution depends on your infrastructure and services.
That is where the Azure Autoscale service steps in. It is a built-in feature that includes mobile services, virtual machines, websites, and cloud services. Its scheduled Autoscale prepares your website and applications before any changes in demand occur.
The Azure Autoscale helps your business applications perform their best when the customer demands change. You can scale your service and IT needs by custom metrics you set.
That feature is particularly useful when it comes to adapting to sudden traffic and load spikes so your website and apps can stay up when you need them the most.
For example, if you have an ecommerce website and expect traffic growth during Green Monday, you can simply schedule Autoscale to add five times more virtual machines to handle the load. Once the traffic peak drops, scaling returns to normal, helping you reduce costs.
Best of all, you do not need any additional coding practices to scale up or down. All you have to do is change settings and add more processors for your application or website to run on a bigger scale. On the other hand, their performance is not affected.
#5 Offering Greater Flexibility
Microsoft Azure facilitates your IT team’s jobs. It allows them to focus on more complex aspects of their jobs. They do not need to waste maintaining underused and yet expensive equipment.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud-native platform, making it easy to deploy your current apps with little to no downtime. Integrated development reduces the learning curve, helping teams master the platform easily.
In addition to scaling their cloud IT infrastructure faster, companies can also scale their data storage capabilities to adapt to the growing business needs.
With Amazon, you can build, deploy, and manage applications with your preferred language platform. Amazon provides hyper-scale relational databases and a NoSQL database with open APIs for any scale. That way, you can adapt your applications to business needs.
With traditional data centers, updating and upgrading the current IT system would require additional investments, such as purchasing new hardware, servers, and operating systems. With Azure hosting, you can create digital solutions faster when you need them.
Grow your Business with Azure Web Hosting
Microsoft Azure provides multiple benefits for both small businesses and large corporations.
It provides you with the flexibility your team needs. With it, you can create hybrid IT infrastructures and adapt them to company demands. Above all, Microsoft Azure is a secure cloud hosting solution with advanced backup and disaster recovery plans.
Therefore, no matter if you need an effective hosting solution for your or your clients’ IT needs, Azure Web Hosting will make the process easier.
I hope these insights will help you!
Do you host your website and business app on Microsoft Azure? Please, share your thoughts and opinions with us.