Azure
What are Azure Reserved Instances and their benefits?
Microsoft recently introduced Azure Reserved Instances (Azure RI) to help Azure’s most active customers save on long-term VM usage. By committing to a one or three-year benefit, Azure customers can now reserve VMs in advance at a deep discount, saving them as much as 82% off standard pay-as-you-go pricing. Ideal for customers with relatively predictable workloads and…
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Microsoft Azure Advisor: What It Is, and How It Can Benefit Your Business
Microsoft Azure offers a full suite of cloud services for virtually every business application. Users can find solutions for everything from digital marketing to e-commerce, SAP, DevOps, monitoring, business intelligence, analytics, disaster recovery, hybrid integration and data backup. Although Azure makes it easy to subscribe to these services, configuring them to run applications can be a challenge.…
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The Virtues of Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Azure Operations Management Suite (OMS) is an advanced, comprehensive offering that brings together four complementary Azure services: Backup, Site Recovery, Log Analytics and Automation and is one of the tools we leverage when providing managed Azure consulting services. As a robust service suite, OMS features quick deployment, cloud scaling, automatic updates, an intuitive interface, and hybrid-cloud reach. To help streamline the OMS…
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Leveraging Azure Sphere for End-to-End IoT Security
With stories of remotely hacked devices and vehicles continuing to make headlines in 2018, security has become a top priority for every industry that leverages the Internet of Things (IoT). Stepping up to the plate, Microsoft recently introduced their end-to-end solution to the problem. On April 16th, 2018 at the RSA 2018 security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft…
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Using Azure Event Grid for Highly Scalable Event-Routing
Azure Event Grid is a highly scalable event-routing service that listens for specific system events, then reacts to them according to your precise specifications. In the past, event handling has relied largely on polling—a high latency, low-efficiency approach that can prove prohibitively expensive at scale. Azure Event Grid, on the other hand, provides a highly reliable,…
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Cloud Database Migration At Scale with Azure DMS
Azure Database Migration Service (Azure DMS) is a fully managed, comprehensive solution for migrating your databases to the cloud at scale. Not to be confused with Azure Migrate, which currently focuses on preparing on-premises VMs for migration, Azure DMS is an end-to-end migration solution designed for databases. The Azure team is working toward adding as many source-target…
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Use Azure Automation to Accelerate Cloud Resource and Workload Management
As businesses move more of their computing resources and workloads to the Azure cloud, they often find that automated management of those resources and workloads can lag behind. Thankfully, Azure Automation bridges the gap. In this post, we’ll first explore six clear advantages of cloud management automation, including error reduction, standardization, reduced operational costs, platform-agnostic updating, streamlined…
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Process Data-intensive Workloads at Scale with Azure Batch Services
Azure Batch is a robust cloud-computing service that provides parallel batch-processing management along with clusters of VMs to efficiently tackle compute-intensive workloads of any size. Although large-scale parallel batch processing has been around for decades, it has long been restricted to those individuals and businesses with the funds and expertise to purchase and run high-performance computing…
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Leveraging the High Scalability of the Azure Blog Storage Service
Azure Blob storage is a massively scalable system for storing images, video, audio and other unstructured digital objects. Stored as blobs and housed in containers in the cloud, these objects are accessible to you anywhere in the world via unique URLs. Blobs come in three types (block, append and page) that speak to different cloud-storage needs and scenarios. Azure Blob storage…
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Leveraging Your Log Data with Azure Log Analytics
With Azure Log Analytics, you can gather and search log data from all of your resources, whether they reside on Azure, on another cloud host, or on-premises. Then you can transform the gathered data into rich analytics with AI-enhanced insights into your environment. To get started, choose between the free and paid options, then follow the…
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