Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. For businesses and information professionals who are familiar with Microsoft products, Azure is the cloud platform with the least learning curve and resistance. Common business services from Microsoft can be found on Azure. For instance, Azure offers Active Directory (AD) service in two forms: Azure AD or customized AD. For businesses who have almost only Microsoft products, Azure offers a much better integration than the other two cloud platform providers AWS and Google Cloud. Other Azure features are as follows :
- Azure Site Recovery (ASR):
After major disasters such as 911 in the USA and earthquakes in Japan, there has been a strong demand for business recovery. The ASR is Microsoft’s answer to this demand. The ASR can back up your data center or your accounts on other cloud platforms in Azure. In times of disasters, your business will be able to recover your information systems on Azure in the shortest time.
- Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for Business AI
Microsoft offers graphical development environments for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence. Your business will find tools that are suitable for developers of all technical levels that enable them to build and deploy an ML model either a no-code UI or with a code-first notebook experience.
You have tools such as no-code UI that uses visual drag and drop, a hosted notebook environment, automated ML, intelligent feature engineering, a wide range of algorithms and hyper-parameters at your disposal to speed up your model development. Microsoft Azure offers powerful GPU computing resources to adjust your model automatically based on data to speedily and effectively train your model.
Azure also provides your business the option of using FPGAs for immediate calculation, which are programmable chips and often appear on network cards. They can execute service requests from the Internet at high speed and do not need to respond through a CPU.