Why Blue Is Better
Azure. The color of sky-blue and the name behind the next innovation in computing.
The Windows Azure cloud computing platform offers tremendous advantages to organizations of all sizes. Let’s examine some of those closely and see how they apply to your business.
Minimize your IT investment
For all companies, especially startups, cash flow management is critical. Deploying an IT infrastructure or Web application typically involves significant hardware and development investments. Windows Azure eliminates the need for capital expenses and provides the platform to launch applications quickly, including hosting, scaling, SQL hosting, and massive-scale storage.
Increase your capacity fast
Anyone who has been involved with the procurement and installation of new systems has experienced delays. Between specification, approval, ordering, delivery, configuration, and deployment, the process can be arduous and slow.
With Windows Azure, there are no hardware processes to deal with. Simply select the size of your virtual machine, and your application is deployed to the Azure fabric in as little as 15 minutes. If your application is already deployed, you can simply utilize more capacity as needed.
Utilize your capacity at peak values on a consistent basis
Traffic on today’s systems is never consistent. Off peak hours, seasonal spikes, decreases and external unexpected activity can cause a fixed system to under and over-utilize resources. With Azure’s consumption-based model, you get great elasticity. Your organization will only utilize the capacity needed on demand. Billing from Azure is strictly based on usage instead of fixed capacity, so your IT efficiency can be completely realized. If a spike occurs, your application’s capacity can be increased to meet demand—within minutes. And when your traffic falls off, removing capacity is just as simple.
Increase speed to market
Lead-time for getting an application idea up and running from a test platform to a production environment can vary from days to weeks to months. While the application may be ready, there are servers, operating systems, load balancers, software patches, configuration tweaks, monitoring, and many other details to iron out. With Azure, a completed application can be deployed in less than a day, including both a staging and production environment.
Scale applications without any server licensing
An increase in usage creates the demand for more systems. In a typical scenario, that would require additional server license fees. The Windows Azure consumption-based model has no additional charges for licensing. Period.
Azure and RDA
As with any platform or infrastructure improvement, you need the most qualified implementation team to get your migration on track…and keep it there. We get cloud computing. We have the know-how to move you forward.
Click here: Read a success story of how RDA helped one company put cloud computing to work for them.