Saudi companies can adopt cloud technologies to thrive and ensure the sustainability of their business
Microsoft Arabia revealed that KSA based companies and enterprises embracing cloud computing technologies in their workplace can increase their productivity and efficiency, ensure their business’s continuity, reinforce competitive advantage in the market and reduce costs by building on the scalability offered by cloud computing solutions.
Companies seeking to thrive through strong competition in the market continue to look for solutions that reduce costs and boost productivity enabling them to accomplish work anytime and anywhere. “Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible and enterprise-grade cloud computing platform that enables SMEs and large companies to design, build, use and manage many applications that run on a vast worldwide network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Applications on Azure platform can be designed with high flexibility by using any tool or programming language or structure as needed which have made it the preferred platform for the majority of IT professionals and software developers,” commented Abdallah Sinan, Senior Business Group Lead – Cloud Enterprise at Microsoft Arabia.
Sinan stressed that it is possible to access data uploaded on the cloud using various devices which will make it easier for people to share, transfer and recover information when needed, whether it is on cloud or on premise. It is estimated that spending on mobility in the workplace will increase in the coming years, therefore, cloud computing services by Microsoft Azure provide employees the ability to work from any location and communicate instantaneously and smoothly.
Speaking on cloud computing Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research said: "When you pull out your smartphone you think you are using this miraculous little computer, but actually you are using more than 100 computers out in this thing called the cloud, and then you multiply that by billions of people, and that is just a huge amount of computing work”.
One of the key concepts of cloud computing is sharing resources and equipment that are used by multiple companies, which achieves savings in size and cost, because applications infrastructure can be expensive when it is on premise. Usually companies do not use more than half of the operational efficiency of their resources, whether it is servers, storage units or even programs that operate their everyday business. Cloud resources can be accessed at higher speeds and can be scaled on demand in addition to payment according to scaling and size, and therefore cloud provides individuals and organizations valuable time and money that can be utilized in other needed operations.
In a survey conducted by Microsoft Arabia about companies deploying Azure cloud computing technologies, participants indicated that they felt a positive change in the results of their work, which contributed to changing the concept of business intelligence and big data. Also they were able through the use of Cortana Analytics and Stream Analytics to make better and smarter decisions using data they already have. It also enabled them to include structured and unstructured data taken from Internet of Things from multiple distributed sources easily in order to enhance the services offered to clients and core business activities, which gave companies a competitive advantage and a new perspective for handling the challenges facing their businesses by rendering their data into smart decisions.
The cloud platform relying on a huge network of data centers run by Microsoft in over 100 data centers around the world ensures the best performance for users and also provides enterprises with service scalability options based on demand and pay-for-service only, without the need to pay additional costs for resources that they do not use. Azure also gave them the best competitive price versus advanced performance, with multiple options; such as Hyper-scale Azure which currently serves more than 500 million users in Azure Active Directory, hosting more than 1.5 million SQL database, storing 777 trillion storage operations a day and processing around 1.5 trillion messages per month for the Internet of Things.
Microsoft solved the dilemma of securing data on the cloud, by offering a full protection of data stored on its cloud. Microsoft creates backup copies of the information stored in data centers on three virtual machines. It also offers additional location back up if needed.
Sinan concluded that there is another feature offered by Microsoft Cloud which is the ease of integration of the “on premise” IT environment, and Azure; Hybrid-Cloud. Through safe private connection, corporate assets stay secured with the ability to expand into Microsoft Azure. This provides greater flexibility and more technology options and minimizes the difficulty of management. Microsoft Hybrid Cloud can also benefit companies be more secure. Such as keeping sensitive data on premise, while keeping the load of compute power on Azure. Thus, the Azure Platform was specially tailored to accommodate various workloads and fit the ever changing needs of enterprises.
