Microsoft Azure for beginners

The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life – to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.

Cloud is everywhere. It has completely changed the way businesses think about IT resources and software solutions. Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases. Even individuals like you and me are using cloud and cloud services on a daily basis.

Azure is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft. Initially it was called Windows Azure. Later renamed to Microsoft Azure. It is an ever expanding set of services to help you build solutions to meet your business goals. It offers a wide variety of services. For example, we have

1. Virtual machines running in the cloud for you to host and run your software.
2. Storage services to store all sorts of data – relational, non-relational etc.
3. Software development and deployment services.
4. Networking and Data analysis services.
5. Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Internet of Things etc. The list goes on.

When we think about moving to a cloud from an on-permise datacenter, 2 immediate things that come to our mind are security and availability.

How secure is my data. If you are thinking, your applications and data are more secure in your own data center than in the cloud, you are almost certainly mistaken. Security and privacy are foundational for Azure. Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards and regulatory compliance. In fact, if you compare Azure with other cloud service providers, it has the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings. As of this recording, Azure has over 90+ compliance offerings – the largest portfolio in the industry.