Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are changing. Close to 25 percent of small businesses and 50 percent of medium-sized businesses plan to increase their cloud spending over on-premises spending. At the same time, many of these companies still have Windows Server 2003 in their environment. With End-of-Life support for Windows Server 2003 rapidly approaching (July 15th, 2015), these companies will be in dire need of new services. With Microsoft Azure, you have the unique opportunity to upgrade your customer’s environment by taking advantage of their interest in the cloud.
Why Azure?
Azure is an open and flexible platform that provides all the building blocks to quickly build, deploy, and manage cloud-based solutions. Azure offers a wide range of usage-based services across applications, compute, storage, and network. You can build applications using any language, tool, or framework on a fully automated self-service platform that enables the provisioning of scalable resources within minutes. The following are great examples of Azure-based solutions partners are providing today:
With Azure you can use your existing tools to create and quickly deploy apps without the time and cost of managing infrastructure. Azure offers secure and flexible development, deployment, and scaling options for any size app. Server apps are validated to run on virtual machines.
- Avoid capital expense for infrastructure
- Reduce IT management burden
- Scale as needed
Azure provides durable cloud storage, backup, and recovery for large and small data. Azure also works with the infrastructure customers already have, helping to cost–effectively enhance existing apps and business continuity strategies.
- Use for a range of apps including file servers, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, and BizTalk Server
- Take advantage of encrypted backups and geo–redundant global datacenters
- Quickly and easily provision storage as needed
Azure enables you to grow your business by helping customers move their websites to the cloud.
- Quickly build, deploy, and manage websites on a flexible cloud platform
- Instantly scale to meet fluctuations and spikes in site usage
- Gain peace of mind from hosting on a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters