Moving to the cloud with Azure

Microsoft Silver Certified Partner Bluegrass Digital believes the new Microsoft Azure data centres in South Africa will reshape the cloud environment in Africa and will now provide the necessary infrastructure for rapid cloud adoption.

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services to help businesses compete on a global stage. It offers the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on an interconnected global network.

Being recently awarded with Microsoft competencies in Azure Cloud Platform and Azure Application Development, Bluegrass CEO Nick Durrant says there are significant savings for customers moving to Azure.

“We have been working on Azure for a number of years through our UK office, migrating client websites and applications into Azure,” he said.

“Locally, we have been helping our clients migrate their corporate website assets into Azure and will continue to improve and support them using a variety of Azure services. With the new Azure data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Microsoft can now deliver all the benefits of the cloud to a local market at local pricing.”

With Azure, companies can now modernise their applications with the flexibility of the cloud and with low latency and the power of these data centres, they can consider things like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

Bluegrass has successfully migrated Costain’s, UK’s leading smart infrastructure solutions provider, website and Umbraco application to Azure. Locally, it has also migrated various Clover brand websites and microsites to Azure.

Durrant says Microsoft Azure offers the best cloud platform, designed for developers to build the most innovative apps.

“It offers many different options for app development in the cloud. This is the second wave of cloud computing – where you focus on delivering the innovation your customers demand, not the infrastructure required to run them.”

Azure allows developers to host business logic that can be executed without managing or provisioning infrastructure. It also provides a variety of ways to store data – unstructured, archival, relational, and more.

Azure is a public cloud computing platform, it is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) that can be used for services such as analytics, virtual computing, storage, networking, and much more.

Durrant says it can be used to replace or supplement your on-premise servers.

“Azure is fast in terms of deployment, operation and scalability,” he said.

“This gives the competitive advantage for the companies to adopt Azure. Being the most up to date cloud technology, the infrastructure and applications could be made agile.

“Pay for what you use, not a fixed price for fixed resources, often paying for services you don’t need or not using. It is flexible, move compute resources up and down as needed and it supports almost any OS, language, tool or framework. Azure is reliable with 99.95% availability SLA and 24×7 tech support.

“Transform your business and reduce costs with an energy-efficient infrastructure spanning more than 100 highly secure facilities worldwide, linked by one of the largest networks on earth.

“Reduce the cost, the time and the complexity of operating a global infrastructure while meeting your local data residency needs. Azure lets you deliver services at the scale you need to reach your customers and partners, wherever they are.”