Why Host Business Apps in Microsoft Azure vs On-Premises

Your business started off with off-the-shelf applications that helped you make it past the startup phase. Once you got well established in your industry, you started branching out into custom software development to adapt to your growing needs. You introduced these solutions over time, but before long, you found yourself dealing with a complicated infrastructure, insufficient uptime and an ever-growing data center.

You can eliminate these issues through cloud-based business application platforms instead of keeping everything in your office. Microsoft Azure provides your company with a flexible service that improves your business software development and deployment in several key areas.

Pros of Switching to Azure for App Server Hosting

Expand Your Business Mobility

Employees work from home, travel for business and use their laptops on a regular basis. You may struggle to keep up with the mobility demands your company makes while maintaining security throughout the network. Microsoft Azure is built from the ground up with an anytime, anywhere philosophy that lets your team connect whenever they need to get their jobs done. Improvements in your business mobility will also help increase employee satisfaction and productivity.

Reduce Your Expenses

Your expenses add up fast when you have on-premises business applications. You may only focus on the upfront hardware costs and software licenses, but an on-site option incurs many additional expenses. For instance, you need employees to maintain the hardware and software. The data center also draws plenty of power, and physical security measures control employee access to your servers. These budget line items add to your total cost of ownership. Azure’s cloud-based solution reduces these expenses, as Microsoft handles the hardware, software, maintenance and data center costs. You need to pay for access to the service, but this price typically decreases your TCO significantly.

Improve Data Integration

Data drives everything from your overall business strategy to your sales team. You need a way to access data throughout your organization, but it’s often separated in each custom application. Microsoft Azure offers several options to help you leverage your collected data through the platform. If you’re using other Microsoft cloud services, such as Office 365, Azure automatically has the capability to access these files. This platform also supports data integration with your on-premises servers if you want a hybrid environment and third-party apps for user-friendly connections.

Get Developer Tools Support

The Microsoft Azure platform comes with many developer tools built into the platform to streamline the cloud application building process. The Azure SDK integrates with Visual Studio, which decreases the learning curve if your software developers already use that tool. They can work in their preferred language, from Ruby to C++, which also has a positive impact on your development cycles. You also get a staging environment to run thorough app tests before deployment in order to catch any problems that didn’t show up in the local development environment.

Match Your Business Growth

Some businesses are victims of their own success, with infrastructures that collapse if a marketing campaign goes particularly well or the business goes viral. Their application servers can’t keep up with the sudden influx of demand, and deploying new servers to handle the load costs time and money. Microsoft Azure grows with you through on-demand capabilities so you don’t have to hamstring your business growth to keep up with your on-site capabilities. Its auto-scale feature is significantly useful in adjusting to sudden traffic and load spikes, so your software stays up when you need it the most.

Improve Your Security

How much of your IT budget goes to security? Chances are, your IT budget is stretched thin between many necessary expenses, and you don’t spend as much in this area as you’d like. Cybercrime and data breaches threaten businesses of all sizes, so you need the best security you can access. Microsoft provides multiple layers of security with Azure application hosting, which helps you reduce the risks from hacking and other malicious behaviors. They have the resources, infrastructure and use state-of-the-art security technology you need to maintain top-level security for your business. If your company lacks enterprise-level security measures, you’re getting a big upgrade through the cloud.

Enhance Business Continuity

Business continuity and disaster recovery plans try to consider every disruptive event that could happen to the company. Everything from natural disasters to fires are covered in these plans, but some organizations overlook one significant detail: what happens when your backups and servers live on-site. Microsoft Azure helps your company keep its applications running through geographically diverse data centers, proactive monitoring and troubleshooting, redundant backups and automatic fail-over. Your office building may be falling apart around you, but you avoid as much downtime as possible through these risk-mitigation measures.

Expert Availability

You can’t afford for your business applications to go down at the worst times or fail to keep up with your business growth. However, you may not have the right IT resources in-house to manage a transition from an on-premise to an Azure solution. Since it’s a widely used platform, you have access to many experienced experts who can guide your migration to the cloud. A partner such as Agile IT can help you get your Azure move done right the first time without risking your data or disrupting your operations.

Still unsure whether Microsoft Azure is the right option for your business? Learn more about Azure Migration, or reach out to us today.