5 Reasons Why Azure is an Excellent Choice for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, it is extremely important that you constantly innovate. You must always look for new ways to go above and beyond your customer expectations, delivering unmatched value with your products and service offerings. And the cloud is your go-to ally for achieving this. Cloud computing will help you boost your brand visibility by extending your reach to a more global audience, enabling you to unlock substantial growth.

However, choosing the right cloud computing partner is becoming increasingly complex in today’s highly competitive cloud marketplace. There are numerous cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP are currently dominating the cloud computing market while being closely followed by other organizations like IBM, Alibaba, Tata, Oracle, etc. And among this myriad of options, Microsoft Azure stands out as the perfect cloud platform for small businesses.

Microsoft Azure comes with certain attributes that are extremely beneficial for small businesses. In this blog post, we will examine these attributes while highlighting how they can help you scale your business and overcome challenges associated with cloud adoption. Let’s start by taking a closer look at the common cloud adoption challenges small businesses face.

Cloud Adoption Challenges for Small Businesses

Small businesses often face some of the most unique challenges when it comes to cloud adoption. Understanding these obstacles is crucial for tailoring strategies to overcome them and successfully harness the power of the cloud. Let’s look into each one of them in detail.

1. Limited Operating Budget:

   One of the biggest cloud adoption challenges that you will face is the limited operating budget. You will typically be operating with a tight budget, which leaves no room for additional cloud expenditures like subscription fees, staff training costs, etc.

2. Lack of Technical Expertise:

   You might lack the in-house technical expertise to navigate the complexities of cloud computing. This leads to situations where you are bombarded with countless cloud solutions and services, unable to make the right choice for your business requirements.

3. Ensuring Data Security & Privacy:

   If you are a small business owner handling sensitive data, you must ensure the protection of your customers' data to avoid legal penalties and prevent data breach incidents. Therefore, you need to carefully evaluate each cloud service provider’s data security and privacy capabilities, making it a daunting task.

4. Compatibility Challenges:

   If your business is powered by a diverse set of legacy systems and applications, cloud adoption can be incredibly challenging. You might run into compatibility issues and lengthy data migration cycles, resulting in extended downtime and other operational complications.

   These are some of the common challenges that you will encounter when adopting cloud solutions for your small business. By effectively tackling them, you can position your small business for success in the cloud and unlock its transformative potential. Now, let's try to analyze the role of Microsoft Azure in helping you solve them.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of cloud services, including storage, computing power, networking, and more. According to data from Statista, Azure has a 24% market share, slowly closing in on AWS, which is the market leader in the cloud computing space with 31%.

Even though it lags behind AWS in IaaS and PaaS service delivery models, Azure is the current leader in the SaaS domain. And several industry experts even predict that it could overtake AWS by 2026 and become the market leader.

Here are some interesting facts that highlight Azure’s capabilities:

• 95% of Fortune 500 companies run their business on Azure.
• It provides the largest compliance coverage in the industry.
• It is industry-agnostic.
• It supports open-source technologies and software.

With a comprehensive suite of products and service offerings, Azure has solidified its position as a major player in the cloud computing landscape. But what makes it an excellent choice, specifically for small businesses?

Here are five reasons that make Azure an ideal cloud platform for your organization.

5 Reasons Why Azure is an Excellent Choice for Small Businesses

All major cloud platforms are fairly similar in terms of their core capabilities and service delivery models. All of them enable you to scale, adapt, and innovate. But what sets apart Microsoft Azure is its commitment to addressing the unique challenges and requirements of small businesses. With its cost management tools, user-friendly interface, pre-built solutions, and more, Microsoft Azure provides an equal footing for you to compete with the big players.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the factors.

1. Extensive Cloud Cost Management Tools

   Like other cloud service providers, Azure also follows a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, in which you only pay for the cloud resources you use. But even so, managing cloud costs can be extremely overwhelming, especially for small business owners like you who are operating with budgetary constraints. This is where Azure’s extensive suite of cost management tools comes into play, empowering you to take control of your cloud costs.

   The Azure Pricing Calculator tool allows you to calculate costs upfront. Tools like Azure Cost Management & Billing and Cost Analysis provide a more detailed view of your resource utilization and expenses. You can also use Azure Budget and Cloudyn to monitor and control your cloud expenditures and optimize resource allocation, helping you stay within your budget.

2. User-Friendly Interface

   The Microsoft Azure portal is designed with an easy-to-use web interface that allows you to effectively manage resource allocation, monitor performance, and deploy applications. This user-friendly interface functions as a centralized dashboard and ensures that individuals with minimal technical knowledge can procure Azure’s cloud solutions without any hassle.

   The portal can also be customized as per your requirements, providing you with the flexibility to access information that is most important to you. You can also create custom dashboards for specific projects, helping you stay focused and organized. Besides the customizable, user-friendly interface, the Azure portal features robust monitoring and management tools (Azure Monitor, Azure Advisor, etc.). Using these tools, you can easily monitor performance, set up alerts for critical issues, and troubleshoot problems in real time.

3. Pre-Built Solutions and Templates

   As a small business, it is quite natural that you don’t always have the necessary resources or technical expertise to build and configure complex cloud solutions from scratch. Azure realizes this challenge and offers numerous pre-built solutions and templates for common business use cases. This will help you quickly deploy and start using cloud services with minimal setup and configuration.

   Some of the offerings through which Azure provides pre-build solutions and templates are:

   • Azure App Service: Provides pre-configured environments and templates for quickly building and deploying web applications, mobile backends, and APIs without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
   • Azure Resource Manager: Comprises templates with pre-defined infrastructure and configuration for your projects.
   • Azure Quickstart Templates: Features a library of community-contributed templates for various scenarios like assembling VMs, databases, etc.
   • Azure Marketplace: Comes with pre-built solutions and templates from both Microsoft and third-party vendors.

4. Easy Integration with Popular Business Tools

   Business tools and applications are important for enhancing your team’s productivity and streamlining your business operations. Microsoft Azure is designed to seamlessly integrate with most of the popular tools and applications, eliminating the need for costly purchases and licensing fees while ensuring scalability and flexibility.

   One of the most obvious advantages of Azure is its native integration with Microsoft 365. That is, you will be able to access and utilize tools and applications like Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams directly from the cloud. This delivers a consistent, collaborative experience for you and your team, regardless of their location or device. It can also be integrated with Dynamics 365, giving you access to intelligent business applications (CRMs, ERPs, etc.) powered by advanced technologies like AI and ML.

5. Trusted Industry Leader

   Microsoft, the parent company of Azure, is a trusted industry leader with vast experience in delivering enterprise-grade solutions. Azure has inherited this legacy of reliability, security, and data privacy, providing you with a cloud platform that you can completely depend on.

   Azure meets a comprehensive set of compliance certification requirements, including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), ISO 27001 (Information Security Management), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and more. These certifications ensure that your data is in safe hands while minimizing the risk of data breach incidents or non-compliance penalties.

   Additionally, Azure also has a global presence that spans over 60 regions, which enables you to take your services and products closer to your customers, thereby ensuring low latency, consistency, high performance, and enhanced disaster recovery and backup.

Gsoft Cloud: Your Trusted Azure Service Provider

While Azure is the perfect cloud platform for small businesses, there will be scenarios where you will need expert help in accessing and integrating it into your workflows. That’s where we come into the picture.

We provide the best cloud consulting services with our team of certified cloud consulting experts. They have extensive experience in helping businesses like yours successfully adopt and harness Azure’s capabilities to drive growth and efficiency.

With Gsoft Cloud by your side, you will be able to acquire:

• Tailored Azure solutions for small businesses
• Managed cloud services for hassle-free operations
• 24/7 support for troubleshooting
• Trusted partnership for long-term success