Cloud computing is quickly gaining ground in the business world and Microsoft Azure is taking the lead. About 84% of enterprises had a multi-cloud strategy in 2019. Gartner’s Top Strategic Trends for 2021 has established that organizations require a strong AI strategy to make sure that their projects don’t stall.

With cloud computing showing no signs of reducing in its application and Microsoft taking a strong lead, it is important to examine what Azure Cloud is and how it impacts businesses and what Microsoft would be doing with it in the future.

What is Microsoft Azure?
Azure Cloud is a cloud platform that provides both low-level cloud solutions and high-level infrastructure. The infrastructure makes it possible for companies to run their applications in a scalable, elastic, and redundant environment hosted in the cloud.

Signing up on the Azure Cloud platform gives you access to over 200 products and cloud services that are designed to offer new solutions to your business operations. It is designed to solve modern business challenges and help build a future that would be unimaginable without cloud computing.

With Microsoft Azure, you can build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge with great tools of your liking.

Why Azure Cloud holds the future of cloud services?
Virtually everything in the digital world has a connection with the cloud in some way. As tech giants focus on developing new ways of organizing, processing, and presenting data, cloud computing is slowly becoming part and parcel of our everyday lives.

In the recent past, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services have provided cloud computing and cloud storage services. Newer entrants such as Vultr and Linode have also made inroads into the space.

What do you think is the future of cloud computing? How will it affect future business strategies, and to what extent? Concepts such as decentralized cloud computing and serverless cloud may start trickling into your mind.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Azure today is synonymous with Infrastructure as a Service. IaaS is the primary low-level public cloud service used to provide instant computing infrastructure. It is managed over the internet.

IaaS is unique because it is less expensive and is a simple way of managing physical servers and data center infrastructure. It offers essential storage, computing, and networking resources on demand.

With all the amazing computing benefits that come with it, adopting an IaaS solution for your organization helps reduce maintenance of on-premises data centers, gain real-time business insights and save money that would have been spent purchasing and maintaining hardware.

Organizations are keen on the scalability of their business operations, and more emphasis will be put on this in the future. IaaS solutions give businesses the flexibility to scale their IT resources up or down as their needs change. They also have a provision for you to quickly introduce new applications, further increasing the reliability of your infrastructure.

With IaaS, you will not incur the costs of buying and managing physical servers and data center infrastructure. Besides, you only have to pay for the resources you need since each one of them is offered separately.

Azure Data and Analytics
Azure data and analytics provide unified data governance that helps organizations do away with data challenges and shape their future.

Azure Cloud makes the future look bright by offering the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics, a limitless analytics service that provides business insights with an emphasis on enterprise data warehousing, Big Data, and data integration.

Azure Synapse Analytics combines various capabilities, among them, machine learning, business intelligence, and data engineering. Simply put, Azure Synapse Analytics securely and seamlessly unifies your company’s data in one location.

You can get started with Azure’s machine learning features in this guide from Iteration Insights.

Data Security
No other player in the tech industry beats Azure Cloud in offering secure cloud computing. Microsoft leverages several years of being a productivity solution provider and being an enterprise operating system to provide top-shelf security to all the information hosted in their cloud products.

Microsoft Azure has put together several resources to ensure organizations’ on-site data centers are secure. They update their systems on a regular basis to make their systems immune to external threats.

Once you have purchased Azure Cloud services, you will gain access to all elements related to the security of your information. All their customers have access to the latest threat detection and prevention technologies.

There is a range of security solutions and architecture that come with Azure Cloud. They include Information Protection which enables organizations to classify and protect specific information, documents, and emails by applying labels to them, and Advanced Threat Protection and Threat Intelligence.

Azure Cloud threat monitoring agents generate real-time security alerts and threat intelligence reports which provide insights into the attackers, their motives, and their tactics.

Improved business sustainability and scalability
Many businesses will be expanding their operations in the future. If they want to do so without major hiccups, they should adopt Microsoft Azure Cloud technology which provides scalability to businesses.

Under normal circumstances, it is quite costly and time-consuming to expand a business and provide it with new infrastructure. Azure Cloud guarantees the availability of services throughout the year, thanks to its many data centers the world over. As if that is not enough, Microsoft is planning to add even more servers.

Azure Cloud boasts of having a physical infrastructure in every continent. This allows for replication in the case where an organization would like to expand beyond the borders of one continent.

Final thoughts
There is no doubt that Azure Cloud is a game-changer in cloud computing. The public cloud service, IaaS, for instance, is making cloud computing very easy while providing a simple way of managing physical servers and data center infrastructure. If you picture the future of cloud computing, you are probably thinking serverless cloud, enhanced data security, improved business analytics, and business scalability. Azure Cloud provides it all. It holds the future of cloud computing in its hands – or in the cloud – so to speak!

Operators can remain successful but risk missing out on new revenue streams and being relegated to a less important role in the connectivity ecosystem if they don’t pursue key as-a-service offerings, a ServiceNow executive told Fierce.

On Tuesday, June 8, a panel of experts will delve into the challenges and opportunities around Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings during FierceTelecom’s free summer Blitz Week event. Ahead of the session, ServiceNow director of product management Tom Schnarr told Fierce telcos do have the option to pursue a pure connectivity play, but will lose out on an opportunity to own the end customer as the technology landscape shifts.

“There will always be a demand for network and connectivity services, so the telco industry will continue to provide that. But now there’s more and more competition in that telco industry,” he said, adding as-a-service offerings represent “an opportunity to make great new amounts of revenue but it’s also a risk in their footprint and to the current offerings they have.”

For those not in the know, Google Cloud senior director of outbound product management for telecom and edge Gabriele Di Piazza explained NaaS “is a model in which customers rent networking services from a third-party vendor instead of building their own network infrastructure.” Meanwhile, PaaS and IaaS are both cloud computing models, with the former allowing customers to run and manage cloud applications and the latter providing resources such as capacity on demand, he said.

Di Piazza told Fierce enterprises are adopting these service models “to keep up with changing business requirements, new application needs, security threats [and] increased complexity” and reap the benefits of “greater speed, agility, scale and reduced costs.”

In terms of whether telcos or cloud players should be the one to deliver them, Di Piazza said “there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for providing these services.” He acknowledged there are benefits to telcos and cloud companies working together in some cases, noting a cloud network like Google’s can “pair very nicely” with that of a CSP to provide global reach and scale.

Schnarr had slightly different take, arguing telcos have an leg up in this space – at least for the time being. “The telcos have a critical asset, they own the network and the network is a critical part of this capability,” he said, but warned cloud players “are building their own networks and they can lease the spectrum.”

“That network and the ability to move the workload around is an advantage the telcos have that the cloud providers are going to be gaining as quickly as they can,” he stated.

In terms of where to start the as-a-service journey, Schnarr said it’s important for telcos to begin developing a service model and catalog. “It really starts with that, how do you describe your capabilities from a technical perspective so now there can be modularity built up into the offer we want to make available…It can then follow a consistent pattern,” he explained.

Schnarr added the process of deploying as-a-service offerings should be thought of as a marathon rather than a sprint. For example, he said, one Tier-1 operator ServiceNow works with started with just one product, which took about six weeks to model. Since then, it’s been able to onboard additional services at a pace of one about every four weeks. “It’s going to take us several years before we get all their services on board, but the snowball is quickly building and we’re able to increase the speed as momentum grows,” he concluded.

Cloud is one of the hottest buzzwords in the tech-powered 21st century. Amid the coronavirus mayhem of 2020, many organizations turned to cloud platforms and applications as the panacea to the challenge of protecting employees’ health while equipping them with the tools to remain productive in WFH condition.

In business jargon, cloud computing refers to using a vendor’s ready-made remote servers, which are located in a data center, to store, manage, and process data, instead of a local server or a personal computer. So, one can consider it as a type of ‘hardware-as-a-service.’ However, the definition of cloud computing still remains ambiguous. A web developer will describe it in a manner that may not be similar to that of a database admin nor system admin. But one thing is certain: the cloud does offer an array of services that can be accessed by a user anytime and anywhere. All she will need is a reliable internet connection, preferably one with higher bandwidth and low latency.

IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS
As cloud becomes an integral cog to business growth, owing to its flexibility, simplicity and diverse choice, it is being included in many organizational frameworks for the same. There are three major approaches to using cloud-based services.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS)
IaaS offers computational power, storage and networking on demand — thus eliminating the high cost of maintaining, staffing and providing power and cooling for an in-house data center if the service is provided externally. In comparison, PaaS includes development tools, database management, business analytics. This allows developers to focus on software design, development and deployment, without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware, software, provisioning and hosting. And by including hosted services, SaaS provides businesses with direct access to the applications by employees, partners or clients. Companies use IaaS, PaaS or SaaS as per their requirement.

Since SaaS applications are centrally managed on the cloud, there are no licenses or upgrades to maintain. Also one doesn’t need to download SaaS software on a desktop PC or business network to run – implying lower upfront costs. Companies generally access applications on a subscription basis, making it ideal for business software like email, instant messaging and customer relationship management (CRM).

Benefits of SaaS
Some of the key benefits of SaaS are accessibility, compatibility, and operational management. It also does not cause loss of data due to equipment failure. Moreover, it is very easy to get started with a SaaS application. To illustrate this, consider a scenario where you have to go grocery shopping. This errand includes, driving to a selected or preferred grocery store, walking down aisles to pick groceries, stand in queue for billing and payment and return home. This is equivalent to traditional on-premise services, whereas, in the SaaS model, one can opt for online grocery shopping at the comfort of your home. Some of the popular SaaS examples include, Salesforce, Qwilr, Google G Suite, Workday, Zendesk, Slack, Microsoft Office 365.

SaaS can help users involved in the gig economy by allowing accessibility to sophisticated software, applications, and tools vital to the management of their respective businesses. It can also help large organizations transfer some of the costs of software development and maintenance to third parties and concentrate resources on managing and securing data. It also allows business teams to create virtual collaborative workspaces with their own additional level of access control.

A recent report by SiliconAngle highlights that the leading names like Salesforce, Workday had impressive runs during the pandemic crisis. However, in the second half of February 2021, these vendors didn’t deliver as expected. Amid the new market challenges and waning enthusiasm, SaaS providers need to get innovative to overcome its shortcomings and take steps to restore the user and stockholders’ faith.

Current challenges include heavy reliance on internet, lower degree of control, lack of integration support, vendor lock-in and few others. Addressing these concerns can help in boosting the SaaS adoption market to new heights.

Microsoft launched a more complete Kubernetes tool to manage clusters on its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that its open source team recommends as a replacement for the existing AKS Engine offering. The Cluster API Provider for Azure (CAPZ) also takes a step back from what has been a more abstracted view for managing container clusters on public cloud infrastructure.

Craig Peters, principal program manager for Azure container compute at Microsoft, explained in an email to SDxCentral that CAPZ is a tool that can be used specifically on and is complementary to infrastructure like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure, and Azure Arc.

It’s built on the open source Cluster API (CAPI) Kubernetes sub-project, which is designed to provide declarative APIs and tooling to simplify provisioning, upgrading, and operating of multiple Kubernetes clusters. CAPZ takes that base and works through the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide greater control for self-managed Kubernetes clusters on Azure and Azure-managed Kubernetes clusters.

“CAPZ enables users to use CAPI to create and manage either self-managed clusters where the user owns the control plane, uptime, and maintenance entirely themselves,” Peters wrote. He added that CAPZ is a tool that can be used specifically on Azure infrastructure through ARM to manage Kubernetes clusters through the Cluster API.

Basically, CAPZ provides for a greater level of management over Kubernetes clusters that are running in one of these managed environments. This allows it to bridge the gap between a user relying exclusively on their managed host for that control or attempting to manage Kubernetes on their own.

In an accompanying blog post, Peters explained that while AKS remains a “mature, scalable, secure” and fully Microsoft-based platform, it does not have the depth of control that some developers require.

“Some need functionality that is not available in AKS yet or might never be because they require user access to the control plane,” he wrote, noting that this need could be tied to regulatory or compliance issues, or even just a developer needing more control over Kubernetes features.

CAPZ Caps AKS Engine
That greater flexibility is also behind Microsoft’s move toward recommending CAPZ over its legacy AKS Engine product. AKS Engine is designed as a templating tool for turning cluster models into ARM templates to manage Kubernetes clusters but lacks flexibility as it can only create one cluster at a time, which limits scalability, and only on Azure.

“AKS Engine has been the workhorse for teams who need to operate their own clusters on Azure,” Peters explained. “The ARM template workflow is natural for some Azure-focused teams but doesn’t provide the power and flexibility of CAPI.”

However, Peters’ in the blog post noted that the “design falls short of empowering ongoing operational needs such as scaling, in-place upgrading, and extension management. And it isn’t useful for users who are focused on multi-cloud scenarios like managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters across cloud infrastructures that do not support ARM.”

As such, his team is suggesting that AKS Engine users look at CAPZ as it provides stronger support for managing the cluster lifecycle and that it will be the focus for all new investments from that team.

ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Metric5 is pleased to announce its Joint Venture (JV) with Octo, Octo Metric, has been awarded the U.S. Air Force Kessel Run Enterprise Services (KRES) Cloud Services contract to support the KRES Cloud Services team for 2 ½ years. Under the $15 million contract, Metric5 will provide software engineering, cloud architecture, site reliability engineering, infrastructure as code, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, test automation, alerting/monitoring strategies, and information security engineering.

“We are thrilled to be collaborating with Octo to support the Air Force as they meet their critical mission protecting our nation,” said Abu Malik, Metric5 President. “Octo and Metric5 have historically worked really well together on a number of programs, and we look forward to continuing the relationship.”

KRES serves as the technical Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) backbone of the Kessel Run organization, enabling product teams to develop applications that support the warfighter.

“We are pleased our advanced capabilities, emerging technology, and innovative spirit meet the needs of the Air Force and Kessel Run,” Mehul Sanghani, Octo’s CEO said. “The KRES contract furthers our relationship with the Air Force, and for that, we are grateful to continue to serve. That we can do so alongside Metric5 is an added benefit.”

Metric5

Metric5 is a customer-focused, employee-driven company that is passionate about leading collaborative digital transformation and modernization initiatives within the Federal Government. We are an experienced SBA-certified 8(a) small business that unites mature, modern capabilities with the dedication and agility of a growing firm. We are headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia with employees supporting civilian and defense agencies in multiple locations including Washington D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts. Our focus is the delivery of mission-oriented implementations, operations, and management solutions leveraging Agile DevSecOps, Cloud-centric, quality-first approaches. We provide expertise across COTS, Cloud Services, and open source technologies