Businesses in today’s digital era face fierce global competition amidst increasing costs, reducing margins, and demanding customers. Statistics reveal that there are 33.2 million small businesses in America, and of half of all businesses that fail in the first 5 years, 42% fail due to lack of market demand. To summarize, some of the reasons for SMBs’ failure in the US are:
- Increasing revenue
- Financial draining
- Changing customer behavior
- Enhancing profitability
- Increasing data security
- Digitalization
- Legal/Government compliance
- Changing business needs
With many challenges, SMBs in the US are searching for secure and profitable options to combat these challenges and increase revenue quickly and effectively. Microsoft Azure with its inherent architecture and features, helps businesses manage infrastructure and data with robust security, cost savings and efficiency.
What features make Microsoft Azure Cloud adoption ideal for SMBs?
Following are some reasons why Microsoft Azure Solutions and Services adoption is crucial for your business.
- Scalability: With Azure Cloud, your business can quickly scale up or down necessary resources as per requirement. Thus, in case of growing data needs or requirements for new functionality, it is as easy to select it from Azure’s menu and deploy it quickly. To take an example, while using Azure App services, depending on the number of website visitors, usage of memory and CPU, on-demand infrastructure requirement, etc., the website can be auto-scaled horizontally (add additional load-balanced servers) or vertically (additional resources to a single server) to manage extra traffic during specific timings.
Picture this:
Suppose you are an e-commerce company that experiences a sudden surge in customer demand during the holiday season. What would you do to handle the increased traffic and ensure uninterrupted service?
Here is where Microsoft Azure comes in!
Using Azure’s autoscaling capabilities, you can dynamically adjust its server capacity based on the incoming traffic. As the number of users accessing the website increased, Azure automatically provisioned additional servers to handle the load. This ensured that the website remained responsive, fast, and available to customers, even during peak times.
Once the holiday season ended and the traffic subsided, Azure scaled down the server capacity, reducing costs by only utilizing the necessary resources. This flexibility will allow you to meet customer demands efficiently without incurring unnecessary expenses during quieter periods.
The scalability of Microsoft Azure will enable you to seamlessly accommodate fluctuations in customer demand, ensuring a positive user experience while optimizing costs.
- Cost benefits: Are you experiencing rising infrastructure costs, maintenance expenses, and limited scalability? With Microsoft Azure, you can significantly reduce costs. It eliminates the need to invest in expensive hardware upgrades or bear the ongoing maintenance costs associated with your on-premises infrastructure. Azure has a pay-as-you-go pricing model. It allows you to pay only for the resources you use, providing greater cost efficiency and flexibility.Additionally, Azure’s scalability allows you to scale up or down based on your workload requirements. You no longer had to over-provision resources to accommodate peak periods, leading to further cost optimization. The ability to provision and deprovision resources on-demand will allow you to adapt your infrastructure to match your business needs, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Furthermore, Azure’s built-in cost management tools and analytics will help you get insights into your usage patterns and resource optimization opportunities. This empowers you to identify areas for further cost optimization and make informed decisions to control and reduce expenses
.
- No downtime: With Azure Availability Zones, Azure offers its clients 99.99% service-level agreement (SLA) assurance of uptime. Thus, Azure ensures no downtime, saving you from the need to purchase secondary infrastructure as a backup.Here is a case study where WaferWire partnered with a leading fintech company to relieve them from frequent downtime and service disruptions.
We migrated their critical applications and services to Microsoft Azure. This migration helped them to significantly reduce downtime. Because Azure’s global network of data centers ensures high availability and fault tolerance. If there is any issue at one data center, Azure seamlessly redirects traffic to another location, minimizing disruptions.
Additionally, Azure’s features like load balancing and auto-scaling enabled the company to distribute the workload and dynamically adjust resources based on demand. This ensured optimal performance and scalability during peak periods, eliminating downtime caused by resource limitations.
The comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities of Azure further contributed to reducing downtime. By replicating their applications and data to a secondary Azure region, the company was prepared for potential disruptions. In case there is a disaster or outage, they could quickly switch to the secondary region. This maintained continuity and minimized customer impact.
With the reliability and resilience of Microsoft Azure, this leading fintech company experienced a significant reduction in downtime, ensuring uninterrupted services for their customers. This improvement enhanced their reputation, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance.
- Robust security and compliance: Azure offers unmatched security management and threat protection with a proactive approach to security, compliance, and privacy. Azure Security Center helps you protect your data by preventing, detecting and responding to security threats in time. Azure holds more certifications than any other Cloud service provider and offers comprehensive compliance coverage.
- Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery is vital for business continuity. The Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service provides businesses with the necessary protection from disasters. The ASR ensures the availability of servers and data when a disaster strikes, offering you the much needed competitive advantage. Azure’s DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) enables business continuity during natural or artificial catastrophes by assuring low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for every business-critical instance at affordable price.
- Integration: Whether it’s an existing application or the onsite IT infrastructure, Microsoft Azure gets integrated with the same ease. Most of the operating systems, databases, application frameworks, programming languages and tools are compatible with Azure Cloud services. You can either develop your application using .Net, JavaScript, PHP or build services for mobile apps. Further, Azure can easily integrate with your existing data centers through a hybrid database and storage options to take advantage of onsite and cloud computing.
- Azure insight: Azure Monitor offers you a hassle-free way to manage your resource groups and maximizes the performance and availability of your services and applications by collecting, analyzing and acting on the telemetry from your cloud environments. It also provides detailed metrics and real-time alerts that make it easy to keep a check on the health and performance of the resources and in turn, your application as a whole.
Besides these impeccable features, there are some out of many ready-to-use solutions offered by Azure that can prove to be a great resource for SMBs.
Ready-to-use Azure Solutions for SMBs
- Azure insight: Azure offers a flexible and open e-commerce platform with built-in tools to analyze conversion optimization, site traffic, customer behavior and history and abandonment zones. Azure extends these functionalities to customer service and supply chain sectors.
- Digital Marketing: Azure provides businesses with tools to manage Digital Marketing functions that act on real-time data and analytics.
- Business Intelligence: Azure offers a broad range of predictive analytics services to enable businesses to make smarter data-driven and better-informed decisions in real-time.
- Apps: It offers various functionalities in this category. With machine learning and predictive analytics, you can scale your SaaS app. You can deliver interactive and rich visualizations by using ‘Power BI Embedded”.
Today, Microsoft Azure has a market share of 23% in Q1 of 2023 and has become the second-largest cloud service globally. It is increasingly gaining popularity with its cost-effectivity and other features. With the right expertise and experience, WaferWire Cloud Technology can help your business gain the
competitive advantage associated with Microsoft Azure Cloud adoption. For more information or queries related to Microsoft Azure Solutions and Services, feel free to contact us.
