According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $210 billion in 2019 – an increase of more than 23 percent over that of 2018. In Nigeria, 78% of companies increased their cloud computing budgets last year.
Recently in Lagos, Nigeria, Microsoft treated industry ecosystem and media outfits to an innovation tour, as it launched its new hybrid cloud and operating model, Microsoft Azure.
The formal engagement was to inform CTOs and CIOs on the new cloud operation model, creating awareness around its Azure offering, alongside driving cloud migration, both locally and globally.
The offer shows the stakeholders the potential revolution that Azure can bring to their businesses and the introduction of Azure Stack HCI, (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure), solutions, which allow customers to adopt models like the hybrid cloud to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
Technology is persuasive and omnipresent and businesses are thinking about how they can be more competitive in this ever-increasing global market. Nowadays, solutions offered by Startups and businesses can be sold anywhere because they are enabled by a new era of technology through the cloud.
Wale Olokodana, Business Group Lead at Microsoft remarked while speaking at the launch “For organizations in the country not wanting to move to the public cloud completely, leveraging a hybrid model may be better suited. This combines private and public cloud capabilities, allowing data and applications to get shared between them”
This new age of digital technology gets empowered by two factors; cloud, the medium that makes services and infrastructure available, while the other is the persuasiveness of data.
Local businesses with the potentials of running globally require much of data in this era of digital transformation. This can be achieved by operating on a platform that enables such capacity. Microsoft Azure is the new cloud platform that offers users quite seamless space to run their market offering.
Unique Features of Microsoft Azure
Earlier on, Wale stated the uniqueness of Microsoft Azure, making specific mention of why the product is different from other cloud services.
- You get your product and solution to the market faster, using comfortable tools at your disposal. The tools can be an open source one, or, a first party Microsoft tool, depending on your choice.
- A special cloud computing service, which is hybrid, gives you the choice of having your infrastructure in, either, your premises, or, in the public, while creating your own strategy.
- Intelligent services, like Artificial intelligence and machine learning, can be infused into solutions. With Microsoft Azure, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to use these intelligent services.
- Trust is a factor, especially, if it involves the issue of cloud computing. A service running on this must be able to provide compliance, transparency, privacy, and security.
Why Microsoft Azure is different?
The cloud is ever changing and getting improvements with new developments and solutions provided by local and international markets. Microsoft Azure, is set to accelerate businesses to a global scale, through high-powered hybrid cloud computing.
With its added stack services, users can bring their data from the public cloud to their data centers, hence, ensuring the issue of securing online data privacy.
Another of its complementary service is the provision of the Express Route, which enables customers to use local cloud service providers in creating a connection with data centers.
With the connection of Microsoft Azure to local cloud service providers, small business owners within the country, are given some level of customization, (Emerging markets building solutions on the platform while leveraging on the potential to scale globally).
Microsoft Azure offers clients application the infusion of intelligence of cost reduction while designing scalable global application.
The Prospects of Microsoft Azure
“We created our Azure cloud offering, recognizing that organizations that migrate to the cloud would require an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help them meet business challenges. The solution also allows organizations, the freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive, global network, using preferred tools and frameworks”, Akin Banuso, Country Manager at Microsoft remarked at the event.
With digital transformation becoming the driving force behind organizational strategies across the continent, businesses are been forced to review their IT strategies and spend – leading to increased awareness for improved cloud adoption.
With this wave, has come the need for organizations to consider cloud computing as a way of storing and managing servers, databases, networking analytics and software through the internet, (cloud).
For business transformation in the digital age – this allows organizations in Nigeria to pay only for cloud services used, helping to reduce operating costs, run infrastructure more efficiently and streamlining scaling, as business needs changes.
