Microsoft Azure

1. Microsoft Azure

Let's now talk about Microsoft Azure.

2. Azure and the market

Microsoft first started by re-purposing some of its software, such as Microsoft Office, Windows Server, or SQL Server, to the cloud, and there is a tight integration between these and Azure services. Microsoft benefits from customer loyalty, and Azure comes to mind naturally for people who already use Microsoft products. As of the end of 2023, Microsoft Azure was behind AWS with 24% of the total market share.

3. Azure cloud services

Some key services Azure offers include Azure Blob Storage for file storage,

4. Azure cloud services

Azure Virtual Machines for computation,

5. Azure cloud services

and Azure SQL Database for databases.

6. Microsoft Fabric

One key cloud computing product now offered by Microsoft is Microsoft Fabric. It is a software as a service that brings together different Microsoft solutions for enterprise use. It covers everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence, and it will be a key service offering for Microsoft.

7. Azure data services

On the data front, Azure offers services such as Data Lake Storage, which can store data before data preparation tasks;

8. Azure data services

Stream Analytics, which allows for real-time analytics tasks to be performed;

9. Azure data services

and Machine Learning, which can be used to train and deploy machine learning models.

10. Azure customers

Microsoft is over 45 years old and one of the world's most well-known multinationals. As a result, they have had many well-known entities utilize Microsoft Azure, including Siemens, The World Bank, and L'Oréal.

11. Azure case study

For this Azure case study, we will look at The Ottawa Hospital, a leading hospital in Canada that provides care to 1.2 million people and employs tens of thousands of professionals. They manage millions of patient records. The hospital decided to revamp its system for storing electronic health records. They needed their system to share records efficiently between its different sites and partner networks. To do this, they found hosting their data on-premises was cheaper, but they needed a disaster recovery site. Disaster recovery is a set of procedures and tools that allows the continuation of businesses and services after a natural or human-induced disaster. This could be an earthquake, fire, or cyber-attack, for example. Specifically, hospitals need to ensure that all patient records are fully backed up and up-to-date. They found hosting disaster recovery too expensive on-premises, so they looked at the cloud and eventually settled on Azure. They used Azure's infrastructure as a service capability to build a scalable, secure environment there. They also use Azure Storage to store medical image data and Azure Site Recovery to deploy recovery processes automatically when a data loss incident occurs.

12. Azure case study

Altogether, the final infrastructure continuously synchronizes with the on-premises databases to keep the data up-to-date. The infrastructure can back up 700 terabytes of data and support 5,300 concurrent users. Additionally, compliance obligations were met with Canadian data privacy law, particularly the Personal Health Information Protection Act. This was all done in under three months! In total, the hospital saved about 50% on disaster recovery costs. Check out the link below to read many more Azure customer stories and learn about their many different services!

13. Let's practice!

Let's check how well you understand the position and services of Microsoft Azure!

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