Are you on your way to building a complex cloud solution with high-load backend architecture? Do you want to migrate your existing solution to the cloud? Looking to store, manage, and analyze any amount of your data in the cloud? If so, you may get overwhelmed by the number of cloud service providers and the avalanche of tools they provide. We get you. We often face this challenge, too, when building cloud solutions for our customers. Since our choice often falls on Azure, we thought we’d dedicate specific effort to learning this amazing cloud platform inside-out.
Working with Azure, we grasped all the advantages of being a Microsoft partner network member. Members get insider information, have continuous support, and exclusive access to resources and tools. That’s why we applied to become an official Microsoft Azure Partner to even better serve our customers’ cloud needs. Moreover, our engineers passed Azure exams to have ‘gold competencies’ in app development and app integration.
So, if you want to jumpstart your cloud journey or redefine the way you do business, Azure could be your best bet.
What are the common problems our customers are trying to solve with cloud services? Our clients turn to us to:
- accelerate development with the use of ready-made cloud services,
- enhance their systems effectiveness by integrating cloud services,
- make their solution more scalable,
- optimize the backend performance of their existing solution,
- redesign a legacy system to make it more robust,
- transfer data to a cloud-based back end,
- make app-to-device communication more reliable,
- reduce database connections,
- distribute application traffic to optimize performance.
All those tasks can be effectively accomplished with the Azure technology stack and their services. Let’s explore how Azure may become a game-changer in your connected solution optimization strategy.
What Exactly Are Azure Cloud Services Good At?
With over 90,000 services, we consider Azure one of the most attractive service providers able to tackle any cloud challenge. From our experience, however, Azure is particularly good at solving the following challenges:
IoT Development
We address our customers’ IoT challenges with the help of Azure IoT Hub. This is a flexible and scalable service hosted in the cloud. It acts as a central message hub for communication between an IoT application and its attached devices. With the Azure IoT Hub, you can easily connect, monitor, provision, configure, and communicate with IoT devices from within Azure.
One of our clients built a connected dog collar to help owners keep their dogs within a safe distance. When developing the solutions' back end, we utilized Azure’s IoT hub. It helped make the communication between the collar and the mobile app stable and reliable. It also made data transfer secure and seamless. In addition, it improved customer experience and boosted client’s satisfaction.
Web and Mobile Apps, Cloud Native Development, and Hosting
If your goal is easier development of cloud native web and mobile apps, and better performance, use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure API Management. With Azure, your solutions will be autonomous, scalable, and adaptive. In our practice, we may use AKS to accelerate application development when the client wants to cut their time to market.
How does Kubernetes improve and speed application development? Kubernetes enables a “microservices” approach to creating solutions. Now you can break up your development team into smaller teams. Each team will focus on a single, smaller microservice.
“These teams are more agile because each team has its own task. APIs between these microservices minimize the amount of cross-team communication required to build and deploy.
Disaster Recovery
Using Azure, you’ll have strong disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. Their solutions are flexible, offer advanced site recovery, and built-in integration. You can back up your data in almost any programming language and on any OS when needed. Moreover, you yourself set up your backup schedule, as well as manually trigger the DR process and configure alerts.
For example, we apply Azure SignalR DR service for 99.9% availability of our customers’ systems. Recently, we used Azure SignalR to solve the back-end failure of the client’s AR-glasses. The system crashed because of an increasing number of data requests. Azure SignalR helped reduce the load on the back end. The service allowed us to forward the signal from the AR-glasses directly to the right addressee with no data syncing and no cache.
Security Capabilities
Azure can safeguard your digital transformation and become a trusted advisor with new security capabilities. Microsoft Azure is the most trusted cloud platform in the US as it complies with most of the international standards for cloud privacy. Thus, the provider guarantees the best service in terms of safety for all operations with your data. Additionally, Microsoft Azure itself has designed Security Development Lifecycle, an industry-standard security process. It helps you get licenses and ensure the best safety in all operations.
Some time ago, we helped our client scale their business and developed an online multimedia platform for remote coaching. The resulting solution comes with virtual coaches for debriefing sessions. The solution consists of two parts: the Admin Portal for user management and the User Portal for debriefing sessions with virtual coaches. To make the app 100% secure, we located its infrastructure in Microsoft Azure cloud. This allows for generating application keys and authentication credentials dynamically at the deployment stage, encrypting sensitive data, and storing it in Azure Key Vault.
App Migration and Modernization
App modernization can accelerate your digital transformation journey and migration to the cloud. It can also reduce the costs associated with legacy technologies. To scale and optimize their costs, we modernize .NET, Java and Linux web apps through Azure App Services and Azure SQL Database.
Our customer wanted to redesign the architecture of their web image/media labeling solution and migrate it to the cloud. Their data was stored on the customer’s local servers. It affected the client-server communication and caused regular delays. We migrated their system and its media storages to the Azure Cloud. This enhanced the system’s consistency, reduced the server response time, and made the whole system more effective.&
DevOps
Modern applications require regular releases of new features. Azure offers DevOps best practices and tools to save your time, ensure security, and enable continuous innovation. They also provide DevOps Assessment Frameworks to develop, test, and release new features. Thus, you get a set of prioritized recommendations with robust and efficient DevOps roadmaps.
Why Should I Choose to Work With an Azure Partner?
Each Microsoft partner automatically gains notable privileges like having exclusive access to Microsoft tools, utilities, and toolkits to provide Microsoft-based IT services and products to other businesses. It also receives continuous online technical support and actionable news from Microsoft.
All of that motivated us to join the Azure partner network. Meaning, now we can offer all that to our customers. Thus, in the event that Azure is a good solution for your challenges, we’ll leverage it to improve operational efficiency, optimize cloud processes, and scale your business.
Direct Access To Azure Resources and Services
As an Azure’s cloud partner, we have access to over 90,000 resources. Additionally, we can get up to 100 licenses for each Microsoft product to deliver even more value.
“Thus, we use all that to help our customers create remarkable products and experiences for their own customers. Collaborating with us, you may forget about costly on-site hardware and most software needed for your activities. You pay only for the resources you use.
Cost Efficiency
The cloud grants the flexibility to adjust the infrastructure to ever-changing needs, a great value for businesses, but it can become very costly. As a partner, we help our customers plan and manage their long-term cloud implementations and reduce their expenses.
Thus, one of the greatest benefits of partnering with Azure is its cost-efficiency—you get access to an unlimited number of resources, all at a reasonable price. Azure is practical because you won’t have to:
- invest in an on-premise or remote data centers as data is stored in the cloud
- buy additional software and hardware for development or increased workloads
- spend budgets for service calls and warranty renewals
- pay for any resources other than those you need
Technical Support and Guidance
When there’s an urgent support issue, the Azure support team knows where to look, and we’re in contact with them 24/7. Our team will help you with support, billing, subscription management, and account management. If your issue requires further attention, we’ll escalate it to Microsoft Premier Support.
Moreover, together we’ll gain fresh perspectives on your Azure environment by recommending cloud services. We also tailor our recommendations to your specific business requirements.
Afterword
The Azure cloud has proven to be one of the most secure and reliable sources for company productivity, scalability without disruption, and growth opportunities. As a partner, Softeq helps customers select necessary Azure services and incorporate them into their products. Turn to us to achieve even more by making the most of your cloud services.
