Hey, everyone. How we doing today? Kevin Baylor of Alliance IT. Thought I would take a minute and kind of talk about the cloud, big infamous word out there that is just everyday life now essentially. And what is a cloud? We all know we have different ideas of it. But I want talk one thing specific about Microsoft Azure which is Microsoft’s hosting platform. As you know or you may not know, we’ve had data centers in our business Tampa, Orlando and Chicago and we’re now down to a little consolidation so we’ve got to Orlando and Chicago data centers.
But we also utilize Microsoft Azure hosting for a lot of our clients as well. We’ve migrated several dozen servers up to Microsoft Azure this year, not only for our small clients but also some of our larger clients as well. So, I just want to briefly talk about some of the benefits of Azure, give you a comfort that it is a viable solution and a lot of times it is faster, better and cheaper. So, Azure.
Up here we have your Microsoft cloud. And down here we’re got your business. So, whether or not you’re going to completely take your business all the way up to Azure and host everything up here, you can do that. There are a lot of tools that allow us to easily migrate everything from your business right up to the Azure platform whether or not it’s just a simple application or it’s a large server environment. We can easily do that for you. We can also help you keep connectivity, so whether or not you’re working from the office or you’re working from home or you happen to be up in the mountains of North Carolina and you need to connect in, Azure is a viable platform and we can help you get there.
You also maybe need a hybrid environment. Well, what does that mean? That means that your business and Azure are going to have a two-way street. You’ve got systems in your office or in your building and you also have systems up in Microsoft Azure. So, those are going to work in conjunction whether or not it’s potentially just a failover solution or maybe you’ve got applications you can’t quite get up to Azure yet but you want to have most everything up in Azure, a hybrid solution works quite well. Clients whether it’s file sharing, dedicated line of business application, or maybe you need some real time failover. Maybe you’ve got some older infrastructure in your office that you can’t quite get rid of yet for one reason or another but you want to get that replicated up and be a real time failover for Azure. The hybrid solution works quite well.
And then you also have the possibility that “Hey, I’m going to run everything in my business but yet I want to have a direct replication up here and this is going to be part of my DR.” So, my disaster recovery plan is Microsoft Azure. It’s sitting up there. If something happens down here whether it’s a fire, a flood, Irma’s evil sister comes along, or maybe I just have a server that goes down. I have this real time disaster recovery that’s sitting up here, ready to spin up and take over for whatever may happen in here.
All these solutions and these scenarios Microsoft Azure can provide most cost-effectively and easily for any size business whether you two or three person law firm, up to several hundred person manufacturing firm and whether you not – you have one or two applications or you’ve got several dozen applications, whether its Sequel, Linux based, Microsoft based, Microsoft Azure platform is there for you and so is Alliance IT.
Have a great day.
