The allure of cloud computing isn’t just in its portability – its in the fact that you can wind up saving money on computing infrastructure and resources, too. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, akin to Amazon’s AWS. If you are already running MS Office in your organisation, then considering rolling over some functionality to Azure holds quite the allure. Today, CodeFirst takes you through a number of concrete ways in which you can save money with Microsoft Azure.
1. Reduce system admin overheads
System admins have long been lords of the office; no one’s quite sure what they do or how they do it, they just keep the machines running and sometimes fix desktop computing issues if they feel like it. This sort of absolute authority means businesses have long been at the mercy of their system admins.
With Azure, when you’re doing away with that machine maintenance, and instead leaving it up to Microsoft to deal with (and only handling software configuration), you no longer need to deal with unhelpful sys admins - or they need to step up their game.
2. Flexible resource power at your fingertips
One of the problems with onsite IT infrastructure is that you either don’t have enough to keep everything running smoothly, or don’t have enough storage space and need to keep upgrading. With Azure services, you can do elastic balancing of both compute loads as well as storage. Instead of purchasing more hardware infrastructure, or having to wait (or free up space) with old or slow hardware, you can switch over some of this infrastructure to Azure.
Do be aware that if you haven’t configured storage and compute facilities properly with Azure it can end up costing a lot more. Power off resources when they aren’t needed and use archival cold storage for data that you might need some day but not anytime soon.
3. Freeing up time by creating automations
While Microsoft O365 already comes with Flow, an automation building tool that works between apps, with Azure’s Logic Apps you can get even more done, with custom automations that can be built by developers to really unlock the power of your data. By utilizing Logic Apps you can do almost anything, which can be particularly powerful when combined with Business Intelligence – helping give you the one up over the competition.
If you’re looking for developers to help build these automations for your organisation, then ask us for more info about our development experience with Azure.
5. Changing from Excel to Azure + Power BI
Data analysts have for years been working with Excel spreadsheets, manipulating data gathered to give informed company intelligence and predictions for the future. Products like PowerBI are removing the need for these data analysts to perform such complex calculations, and reducing the rate of errors that goes into these calculations. But huge data stores and complex processing power (such as machine learning) may be needed to do this.
How are you saving money by switching over? By saving data analysts’ time and saving more time that would be spent fixing errors (or even time spent recovering from accidental incorrect advice).
Business Intelligence products should be on every business’s wish list.
6. Azure Cost Management
Worried that your Azure running costs will start to stack up, winding up costing you far more than your existing technology solution? That’s why Azure has its very own product to help with overseeing cost management of other Azure products. With Azure Cost Management you can monitor spending and look at where to make changes to save more money. This unified dashboard and tooling means you have a complete overview of spend at all times – and it’s included in all subscriptions.
7. Know when to choose O365 and when to choose Azure
Many organisations get pretty excited about cloud infrastructure, until the costs of moving on premise servers to cloud servers are outlined. If simple access-anywhere file systems and use of Office apps is all that you are really looking for, then moving over to O365 (Microsoft’s cloud Office implementation) with OneDrive, plus building a Sharepoint Online site for access could be all that’s needed. Getting in an expert to evaluate the various solutions first is critical.
CodeFirst can help in evaluating which development solutions are right for your company – and which ones might end up costing you more than they’re worth to the business. Get in contact with us now for more information.