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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Cloud-scale Messaging with Azure Service Bus and Event Hubs
Sophisticated message-handling plays a central role in cloud and hybrid workflows in 2018. For Azure users, two message-handling services stand out. The first, Service Bus, is built around queues and is one of Azure’s most mature and robust services. The second, Event Hubs, is built around data streams and helps Service Bus handle event-related messages at any…
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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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Azure ExpressRoute – Accelerate Your Azure Connection
For security reasons, many businesses prefer to connect to their cloud resources through a virtual private network (VPN). However, the relatively sluggish performance provided by standard VPNs can fall short of the demands of mission-critical business processes and apps. To help solve this problem, the Azure team built ExpressRoute: a direct, private, secure connection to Azure that…
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When Azure Service Issues Impact You – Azure Service Health
When something goes wrong in your Azure environment, it’s not always clear whether the problem lies on your end, or with Azure. To solve this mystery, the Azure team built Azure Service Health, offered free within the Azure portal and is one of the resources we leverage as part of our Azure Support Services. Rather than…
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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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