According to a recent IDG study on cloud computing, SMBs are investing on average $889K per year in the cloud. For larger enterprises, this increases to $3.5 million a year. Moreover, the study found that 73 percent of organizations have at least one application in the cloud. Despite all that, quite a few companies are hesitant to fully commit to bringing their IT infrastructure online. The most common inhibitions we've noticed in talks with our clients are concerns about uptime, security, privacy and the challenge of migrating legacy infrastructure. Nevertheless, the Microsoft Azure cloud offers an answer to all these concerns, which we'll detail in this blog.

Is my operational continuity guaranteed?
Without direct control over server maintenance, many organizations worry about the continuity of their operations. Yet continuity is one of the prime reasons you should move to a cloud environment such as Microsoft Azure.

Thanks to redundancy of your data on multiple servers over different data centers and even multiple regions, uptime and availability are much better than when you’re hosting your own servers. If one server or even an entire data center fails geo-redundancy enables you to continue working as your data is still available elsewhere.

Even if your office internet connection is down due to, for instance, roadworks, you can just continue your work from home or through the mobile networks. If an on-premise data center is damaged or disconnected, all guest sites are impacted without many alternatives to continue working. Functions within Microsoft Azure, such as autoscaling of your environment, also guarantee you never lack the power to handle peak moments.

Is my data secure?
Worried about security? No need! Microsoft Azure has more security certifications than any other cloud provider, local or international. The Azure Security Center also gives you the right tools to manage your environment with state-of-the-art technologies like artificial intelligence to protect your data from outside attacks. Moreover, you determine the rules and access policies yourself. You can install conditional access based on rules, location and others. Shielding information from whoever you need to.

On the physical side, the Azure data centers have top-notch security with video surveillance, heavily restricted access and entire security teams. Creating a much-improved protective layer than on your on-premise data center. If you want to see how Microsoft’s physical data centers are secured, you can try out this virtual tour.

Can I comply with privacy regulations like GDPR?
Part of compliancy with GDPR offers the ability to secure and audit your data and/or customer data. As described above, data is very well protected on Azure. Moreover, Azure includes a lot of tools to manage and classify access to data, another crucial part to regulation. Access can be granted based on a roles model. On itself Microsoft Azure doesn't make your organization compliant. However, it is providing you with tools that help you be compliant with privacy laws with much less effort, time and budget compared to making your on-premise environment compliant.

Would migrating legacy infrastructure be a hassle?
Most companies have legacy applications running in their on-premise data center. Transforming to the cloud, also means migrating those legacy applications. For many this seems like a daunting task.

While it will certainly require some effort, Avanade has created an Application Roadmap to Cloud (ARC) track, which investigates the best approach and model to move every legacy application to the cloud. Joining forces with the right partner will help you ask and answer the necessary questions and make your cloud project a success.

At Avanade, your cloud success is our mission. Through research and helping many clients, we've gained the insights to create our Cloud Transformation framework and workshop, which uses our Application Roadmap to the Cloud (ARC).