Using Automation with Azure Services to Make Your Business More Efficient

One of the things that Azure services are known for is providing automation for your business. Here are some examples of their services, including how you can use them to help enhance your business and increase your margins.

Get Full Management for Your Internet of Things Swarm

The Microsoft IoT Hub through Azure makes it so that you can automatically have huge numbers of IoT devices running simultaneously through the system. This could be everything needed for your business from security systems to thermostats, business-specific objects like in physical stores and everything in between.

The devices don’t have to have a 24/7 connection to be managed by Azure either. However many times they connect, Azure can stay on top of it. This type of functionality could be crucial to your business since you can hardly keep an eye on thousands or even tens of thousands of individual IoT units if this is an important part of your business.

This service gives you a fair amount of control so you can set up parameters for micromanaging how devices interact. You can do it across various different operating systems as well. That way, if you’re concerned about specific devices gaining access to the network when they shouldn’t you can add this exception into the system and shut just that device out while allowing the rest of the swarm to function normally.

Microsoft Integration and Virtual Machines

You can create virtual machines in Azure that you can then use on the premises, using systems like Windows and Linux. The fact that you can then run automated systems with these virtual machines and also fully integrate them with all Microsoft packages including Outlook and Microsoft 365 will give you a lot of versatility for getting done what you need to get done for E-commerce and beyond.

It’s important to have the option to go with virtual machines in a system like this considering how much flexibility this gives you. Even small operations can gain additional capabilities as long as virtual machines are employed. You can scale your operation much more than would often be feasible otherwise, for example. The virtual machine capabilities of Microsoft Azure are also significant, making them often a good choice both in terms of the capabilities you’ll gain, but also in terms of the security of each virtual machine as well as the system as a whole. Additionally, you have the certainty of quality that comes with a brand name like Microsoft. This advantage is surely not to be underestimated either.

Find What the Problem with Your App is with Application Insights Service

This particular service from Azure gives you automation in the form of allowing you to automatically be alerted when there are issues with your apps such as exceptions, or simply if your app is underperforming the benchmark that you set for it. With Applications Insights, you have the ability to locate the cause behind any problem with an app automatically, without a lot of micromanaging.

This service has a number of integrations with Virtual Studio, Git Hub, and others, and you can start right inside Visual Studio if you prefer. This is also one of the services that heavily uses machine learning. This is how the system can adapt to your particular apps, learn their regular rhythms, and then use this information to tell you when something is off. Any kind of anomaly or strange event, including anything to do with a shift in the app’s usual performance, can be picked up by this service that way.

There’s also the Azure Diagnostics part of this where you can keep a handle on how your virtual machines are going and get other diagnostic data about various cloud services, for example.

Machine Learning Studio for Additional Analysis

This part of Azure is beneficial because you can handle the whole thing without even having to worry about coding at all. It actually has a classic drag and drop approach instead. This means that it’s an excellent approach for those running small businesses who don’t have a lot of personal skill with this aspect of Azure or the ability to employ someone who does for whatever reason.

Basically, you can use this to quickly set up an automated approach to machine learning solutions capable of making predictions that will help benefit your business and increase its efficiency as well as the wisdom of the choice that are made. Azure has information, tutorials and general introductions on how to use machine learning, which add to the ease of use for beginners in this field.

If you need to use something off the beaten path such as for Python or Current R, you’ll have the ability to do this within the options of the Studio as well.

Service Bus

Messaging is often a critical part of any business, and Azure lets you use Service Bus, which is their cloud messaging service. Just about any business is going to need a strong messaging service to tie itself together internally, as well as manage other forms of messaging again such as between any interested parties.

The whole Messaging as a Service or “MaaS” industry is becoming an important one, and you have an advantage with Microsoft Azure in that it’s created a highly reliable service here. Some of the benefits to this approach include that you can connect services and applications together even in the scenario that you have one of these that’s disconnected from the Internet. You can subscribe to message threads, choose to publish them and perform all of the other usual tasks connected to this kind of service.

At the lower end of the scale for pricing, under “Standard” pricing you have the 256 kb per message cap, but premium lets you go as high as 1 MB. This kind of flexibility makes it so that you can decide what level fits your business better. If most of your messages are highly functional and textual in nature, then you’re not going to need the larger file cap size, for example. You may need it more if you find that you’re constantly sending files that put that total size up.

The Standard model for this also has other advantages, however, such as the option for a “pay as you go” model, with the added benefit of making it so that you can get fixed pricing if you go up to the premium model.

Overall, the businesses that perform the best tend to be the ones that are the most efficient and that make the most of all options available to them, including all modern technological solutions. These days, this often refers directly to automated systems. Not only will this give you an advantage over your competitors if you use these systems and they don’t, but you’ll often find that efficiencies in one area due to increased automation will help you replace other systems as well and increase automation there too. The more you use automation with your business, the more you’ll think of additional areas where it could also help.

For more information about Microsoft Azure and other topics related to improving the outlook of your business and its long-term successful operation, please make sure that you contact us today.