Organizations across the globe are realizing great success with business solutions powered by cloud. They are redefining the way they do business with scalable and secure cloud-enabled enterprise applications. Worldwide, 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure to drive their business, including Microsoft Azure managed services.

Unquestionably, many organizations already use Microsoft Azure to quickly build, deploy, and manage customized applications. Further, Azure offers built-in support for a wide variety of frameworks, databases, devices, and frameworks so any business can access these types of tools easily.

Here are some of the critical reasons to choose Azure for your organization:

Cyber security: Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is an industry leading security process on which Azure has been designed. It comprises security at its core and private data & services stay safe and secure on Azure cloud. Further, Microsoft Azure offers excellent compliance coverage of over 50 compliance offerings and is the most trusted cloud platform by U.S. government institutions. Also, it was the first to embrace the new international standard for cloud privacy, ISO 27018. Thus, Microsoft guarantees the best in terms of safety for all operations and data on the Azure cloud.

Scalability and agility: Applications that run easily, unaffectedly and scale from 10 to 10 million users can be created without any additional coding by using Azure. Azure Storage provides ductile, safe, secure and performance-efficient storage services in the cloud. It becomes simpler to change settings and use more processors for the application to use.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities: Azure boasts an enticing combination of IaaS and PaaS services. IaaS enables enterprises to outsource their infrastructure on Azure and pay for what they use and PaaS lets them create their own web apps & solutions without having to buy and maintain the underlying groundwork. The right Microsoft Azure managed services vendor can assist your organization with PaaS and IaaS to build enterprise apps on the cloud for accelerated business growth.

Unparalleled hybrid capabilities: Azure has hybrid capabilities that makes it unique. Azure facilitates easy mobility and a reliable consistent platform between on-premise and public cloud. Azure provides a broader range of hybrid connections including virtual private networks (VPNs), caches, content delivery networks (CDNs), and ExpressRoute connections to improve usability and performance.

Integrated environment with other Microsoft tools: Organizations dependent on Microsoft tools like Office 365, Outlook and SharePoint invest in a cloud platform that impeccably integrates with Microsoft products. Use of Azure simplifies operations by using the same virtual on-premise machines like Windows and Linux.

Analytics and Intelligence capabilities: Azure facilitates SQL and NoSQL data services and built-in support for digging deeper into data and uncovering key insights for improving business processes and decision making. Azure is the only cloud platform that offers Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), Machine Learning, Bots, and Cognitive API capabilities.

Easy learning curve: Developers are often familiar with the tools and programming languages already compatible with Azure, including C++, Visual Basic, C#, Visual Studio, ASP.NET, and more.

Cost-efficient solution: Fortunately, with a managed IT services provider, you can utilize Microsoft Azure on a pay-as-you-go billing structure. Therefore, you only pay for what you use. However, you can always expand and pay for additional services as needed. Why is this effective? Well, this billing model eliminates wasteful spending and IT administration costs. In addition, Azure links and supports 42 regions with its global data centers.

Interoperability: Amalgamated applications can be developed for on-premises applications such as cloud databases with Azure. Azure aids Internet protocols and open standards such as XML, SOAP, REST and HTTP. A software development kit for Java, PHP, and Ruby is available for applications written in those languages and Azure tools for Eclipse.

Identity & Access Management (IAM): Azure offers secure IAM capabilities with Azure Active Directory service to enable right users to access the right information. With Azure, any organization can adopt mature IAM capabilities to reduce identity management costs and become more agile, thus supporting innovative business initiatives.

Does Microsoft Azure come with AI?

Yes, it does come with Azure cognitive services, machine learning, and task-specific AI models.

What are Azure Cognitive Services? They are a collection of Azure APIs that also use AI to improve your applications in the following ways: Speech, language, vision, knowledge and search. Other areas include:

• Speech to text - transcribe any video or speech immediately
• Text recognition in video
• Content moderation – videos reflect the content you want to display
• Speech to text
• Facial recognition – makes a significant impact on the strength of cyber security
• Language translation – translation in an instant

Consider these unique speech services:

• Speaker recognition – every end-user has a recognized speech pattern
• Language. Natural language cognitive services around natural language processing and understanding for use with voice commands (telling the computer to lower the thermostat for instance.)

Knowledge search is another useful component. Traditional web or video searches; populating auto suggestions as part of that search engine. And processing that intelligence behind those searches to know what a user would most likely be looking for when they begin typing

Here are just a few examples of the advantages AI can potentially offer:

Intelligent automation. AI technology allows for the automation of routine tasks – such as generating sales forecasts. With this type of efficiency and AI’s self-learning capabilities, companies can make more well-informed decisions in less time.

Efficient use of labor and capital. With AI-driven automation tackling mundane day-to-day obligations, workers can focus their time and energy on other more valuable, strategic projects. When team members focus on what really matters, business capital can be better utilized in areas that will have a greater impact on the company.

Creation of new roles. Contrary to what many business owners believe, AI technology can facilitate job growth rather than diminish it. Given the abundance of data that we use daily, there will be an increase in demand for skilled employees to interpret and manage this information.

Host and develop web and mobile apps. Whether you’re looking for a platform for hosting, developing, or managing a web or mobile app, Azure makes those apps autonomous and adaptive with patch management, AutoScale, and integration for on-premise apps.

With Automatic patch management for your virtual machines, you can spend less time managing your infrastructure and focus on improving your apps. Azure also comes with continuous deployment support, which allows you to streamline ongoing code updates. AutoScale is a feature built into Azure Web Apps that adjusts your resources automatically based on customer web traffic so you have the resources you need when traffic is high, and save money when you’re not in peak times. Through Azure, you can seamlessly link your web app to an on-premise app. Connecting apps in both locations lets both employees and partners securely access resources inside your firewall—resources that would otherwise be difficult to access externally.

Innovate with IoT industry solutions. The scalability, flexibility, and security of Microsoft Azure makes it the perfect resource for companies moving toward IoT solutions. You can connect your devices to the cloud using solutions that integrate with your existing infrastructure and start collecting new data about your company. Within the Azure IoT Hub, you can monitor and manage billions of devices and gain insights to help you make better business decisions, improve customer experiences, reduce complexity, lower costs, and speed up development.

The enhanced security of Azure is a huge asset for IoT solutions, which traditionally have security gaps that hackers can take advantage of. Other benefits include remote monitoring and predictive maintenance and analytics. Getting started is easy with Azure IoT solution accelerators, preconfigured templates that are customizable to your needs.

Compliance, security and risk management. AI can automatically monitor and identify security risks to ensure that business and customer data is safe.

Applying AI

Organizations across a wide range of industries already rely on AI. In recent years, we’ve seen a surge in the demand for and implementation of this cutting-edge tech in these fields in particular:

Healthcare. In the healthcare industry, AI-powered applications can provide patients with personalized medical information right at their fingertips.

Retail. AI in retail gives customers a more personalized shopping experience. With complex algorithms, shopping applications can predict and pull in results based on previous searches – providing customers with additional purchase options based on behavior patterns.

Manufacturing. In manufacturing, this advanced type of technology can perform quality control and diagnostics to ensure that plants and facilities run smoothly and efficiently. AI and machine learning can be used to create more accurate demand forecasts, optimizing manufacturing processes and much more.

Banking. AI in the banking industry is primarily used for security and fraud prevention. With AI software, banks and other financial institutions can identify suspicious transactions and send an alert back to the account holder.

Key takeaway

You have a vision. As a Microsoft partner, SSI has the Azure solution to get you there.