Thought Leadership

Key Reasons to Migrate to Azure:
Why Blue Is Better

Azure. The color of sky-blue and the name behind the next innovation in computing.
The 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. 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 Azure, there are no hardware processes to deal with. Simply select the size of your virtual machine, along with the number of users, and your application is deployed to the Azure fabric in as little as 15 minutes. If Azure 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 is increased to meet demand—within minutes. And when your traffic falls off, Azure removes unneeded resources just as quickly.

 

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.

 

Built-In Disaster Recovery

Azure distributes an application’s usage across several servers on different fault tolerant domains, as well as separate locations within a data center. The result is a guaranteed 99.95% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). Further, Azure backs up its relational databases and highly-scalable storage in a minimum of three locations to ensure durable storage. If an application’s hardware ever fails, the Azure fabric re-deploys immediately to new hardware. Azure provides transparent maintenance with automatic operating system updates and patches and your application is never taken offline.

 

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 consumption-based model has no additional charges for licensing. Simply select the number of users, and pay only for those on a per-hour rate. 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.

 

Next steps:

• Contact us to find out how RDA and Azure can help your business.

• Watch our Azure webcast.

• Learn about RDA's five-day Azure offering

• Read a success story of how RDA helped one company put cloud computing to work for them.