AZURE APPLICATION HOSTING
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Application Hosting in Microsoft Azure
The Microsoft Cloud Platform has a number of advantages over a traditional on-premises server for application hosting.
Flexibility of Hosting Applications in Azure
Azure offers a range of pre-configured virtual machines that can be used to replicate almost any traditional environment. This means that an experienced cloud consultant can configure an environment that meets the needs of your application as it stands. Advanced cloud services go beyond this. In most cases, application usage changes over time. There will be periods of peak activity and times when usage is much lower.
One of the benefits of Azure application hosting is that you can take advantage of this flexibility and change the specification of your environment to meet demand. At peak times, additional memory or cores can be provisioned in the virtual machines which provides improved performance for end users. Similarly, at times of lower usage, you can scale back the environment so that you reduce costs.
Greater Reliability of Azure Application Hosting
A key disadvantage of any legacy server is the inevitable downtime. Aside from regular maintenance and updates that mean applications are unavailable, there are also unplanned outages that occur on an all to regular basis.
Even with 99% up time, a server would be unavailable for approximately 1 hour every 4 days. This means that business critical applications cannot be accessed. By using Azure Application Hosting, you can avoid downtime due to the virtualised infrastructure being decoupled from physical hardware. Even if machines are down for maintenance within the data centre, the load is simply shifted across to other areas. With duplication across multiple data centres, it’s possible to get uptime approaching 100% – which means that staff can work without interruption.
Cost Savings of Hosting Applications in Azure
In most cases, using the cloud simply costs less than legacy equipment. There are a number of areas which contribute to this.
Set up
When you migrate applications to the cloud, there is no up front capital expenditure to source hardware (and no long wait for delivery). There will often be an onboarding consultancy fee to cover the cost of provisioning and performing the Azure migration of your applications and data.
Power
Even a relatively small data centre can be expensive to run. You need to pay for power for the servers and also for the cooling equipment to keep systems operating at an appropriate temperature. Changing to Azure application hosting means that you benefit from the scale of an enterprise data centre where hardware is fully optimised and where all of the costs are included in the subscription.
Flexibility
As noted above, a key advantage of hosting in Azure is that you have the ability to scale the machines based on demand. This means that rather than having a fixed set of infrastructure, you can raise and lower performance levels as required which means we can reduce the cost of Azure.
Maintenance
Having qualified staff on hand as part of your internal IT team with the skills to manage legacy hardware is costly – especially at times when things are running fine. With Azure, and Valto’s managed services, you benefit from access to a team who provide full support including applying software patches – and with high uptime SLAs, you don’t need to worry about maintenance in the same way.
Find out More
If you’d like to find out more about Valto’s approach or want to know about how we can help you successfully migrate applications into Azure and provide cost effective ongoing Azure Support, please contact a member of our team today on 01244 747 600.
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