News & Insights

What If You Could Reduce Costs By Up To 50% On Key Cloud Workloads?

What if you could save up to 50% over on-premises infrastructure by migrating your data to the cloud? 

The cloud is transforming how businesses consume IT today by offering consumption-based resources and services that can scale up or down, as needed.

What is happening with cloud technology?

  • The cloud is transforming how businesses consume IT
  • Consumption-based resources and services can scale up or down
  • Scale used to be cost-prohibitive to small businesses
  • SMBs can reduce costs by 50% by moving data to the cloud

Azure makes it easy to scale up or down as your business needs change. With Microsoft Azure, you can save time, money, and effort on data back-updisaster recovery, and security management workloads.

In fact, a recent McKinsey study found that SMBs can reduce costs by as much as 50% by moving to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. And, according to AMI research, roughly one quarter of small businesses and one-half of midsize businesses plan to shift their budgets to more cloud spending over on-premises spending.

Here are a few easy ways to get started on your journey to the cloud

Data Back-up

Pay for only the storage you need—when you need it

With Azure back-up solutions, you can protect your data and applications to avoid costly business interruptions or to meet compliance requirements. Securely extend your on-premises backup storage and data archiving solutions to the cloud -reducing cost and complexity, while achieving efficiency and scalability.

  • Increase capacity while reducing costs: With a low-cost, massively-scalable, tiered backup storage solution in the cloud, you’ll reduce forecasting risks while transforming capital expenditure commitments to a pay-as-you-go cloud model.
  • Manage backup and data archiving: Simplify backup and data archiving with backup-as-a-service and hybrid storage solutions that easily restore data and applications from the cloud.
  • Ensure compliance: Benefit from the most comprehensive compliance portfolio available, get more than 99 years of retention for your backup data, and pick any Azure region around the globe for your backup and archive location.

Due to business or compliance requirements, most organisations are required to protect their data for years, and over time this data grows exponentially.

Traditionally, tape has been used for long-term retention. Cloud Back-up provides a compelling alternative to tape with significant cost savings, shorter recovery times, and up to 99 years of retention.

Your backup data is secure over the wire and at rest. The backup data can be stored in geo-replicated storage which maintains six copies of your data across two Azure datacentres. For lower cost on less critical data, your backup can be local-replicated with three copies.

With 99.9% service availability, Backup provides operational peace of mind. Built-in features, such as compression, encryption, longer retention, and bandwidth throttling, help boost IT efficiency.

Disaster recovery

Premium protection against operational and human errors with intra-cloud disaster recovery and backup

Even a minor outage can put you at a competitive disadvantage. So, be ready with a business continuity plan that includes disaster recovery for all your major IT systems-without the expense of secondary infrastructure.

  • Protect all of your major IT systems. Affordably: Eliminate the hassle and cost of secondary datacenters and tap into nearly infinite capacity at a moment’s notice with a cloud-based data recovery solution designed for the needs of enterprises.
  • Unify data management, security, and protection: Achieve business goals for continuity and compliance throughout the lifecycle of your apps.
  • Ensure apps work when you need them the most: Rest assured during an outage or disaster scenario with a disaster recovery solution that protects and natively supports the widest range of enterprise applications of any cloud disaster recovery provider.
  • Perform tests any time for complete confidence: When a disaster hits, the last thing you want is to run into a problem. Test your business continuity plans or run dev-test copies of production workloads in Azure whenever you need to, and without impacting users. Plus, test new versions of applications with copies of live data, and then seamlessly put the new version into production in your datacentre.

Site Recovery can help restore services if you have a site outage at your primary data centre. This is true even for complex workloads. Azure Site Recovery makes it easy to test your site recovery plan whenever you want. It won’t disrupt normal operations.

Use Site Recovery to protect Hyper-V, VMWare, and physical servers. It automatically manages replication. It does this by working with technologies such as System Centre and SQL Server AlwaysOn.

It can also migrate applications easily or temporarily push to Azure if there’s a higher demand. Site Recovery also makes it simple to develop and test new applications with copies of live data.

Security

Industry’s most extensive threat intelligence

With an increase in security breaches and cybercrimes, companies are rightfully concerned about the security of their data in the cloud. Azure has several industry-leading options for managing and monitoring your assets.

Azure Security Center has robust capabilities to prevent attacks. When threats do happen, Security Center can quickly detect and respond to threats with advanced analytics and Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph.

  • Understand security state across on-premises and cloud workloads: Automatically discover and onboard new Azure resources and apply security policies across your hybrid cloud workloads to ensure compliance with security standards. Collect, search, and analyse security data from a variety of sources, including firewalls and other partner solutions.
  • Find vulnerabilities and remediate quickly: Continuously monitor the security of your machines, networks, and Azure services using hundreds of built-in security assessments or create your own.
  • Limit your exposure to threats: Block malware and other unwanted code by applying application controls adapted to your specific workloads and powered by machine learning. Enable just-in-time, controlled access to management ports on Azure VMs to drastically reduce surface area exposed to brute force and other network attacks.
  • Detect and respond swiftly to attacks: Use advanced analytics and the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph to get an edge over evolving cyber attacks. Leverage built-in behavioural analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and zero-day exploits. Streamline investigation with interactive tools and contextual threat intelligence.

Read how INNOVATE unlocked the potential of cloud solutions to support effective business operations for Ecovis DCA.