“Cloud” has been at the frontline of humankind’s fight against the COVID-19. It has not just made lives virtually livable during the time of lockdowns and social distancing but has also ensured business continuity. Cloud technology has provided businesses with a resilient foundation of anytime, anywhere infrastructure on-demand that is critical in uncertain times like these, and will continue to play a pivotal role once office shutters open.

Remote Working is the ‘New Normal’

74% of CFOs recently surveyed intend to move on-site employees remote beyond COVID-19.

-Gartner Study

The last few months of remote working, hugely enabled by the cloud, have shown that productive work can be executed anytime, anywhere. And at this point, there is a clear forecast that businesses will extend remote working even once social distancing is no longer required. This means organizations need to gear up for an extended period of remote working and prepare their infrastructure likewise.

Challenges of the ‘New Normal’

For many organizations the transition to the cloud has been very smooth, while there are others that face major roadblocks. The fact is: with the sudden COVID-19 outbreak many organizations chose their cloud services as a temporary remote working fix. As a result, their cloud experience has not been optimum. Let us look through some of the major challenges faced such organizations:

• Security: Remote working presents a new set of challenges for data security, as home environments do not have the same safety standards as your office. Additionally, the high stress levels of your employees make them ideal candidates for successful COVID-19 themed phishing campaigns. Logically, organizations need to address these and many other cloud computing security risks.
• Governance & Control: In today’s cloud-based world, IT does not always have full control over the provisioning, de-provisioning, and operations of infrastructure. All these are delivered by the cloud service provider as a part of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model. This has complicated things for the IT with regards to governance, compliance, risks and data quality management.
• Innovation & Agility:Organizations feel the need to innovate new ways to sustain and thrive amidst the ongoing economic slowdown. One of the innate abilities of the cloud is to help organizations stay agile. It offers a multitude of tools and services that break down barriers, help businesses innovate, and allow them to respond to changes fast, without being hindered by hardware or infrastructure hurdles. However, organizations still need easy to use and robust tools which can be leveraged by the users to carry on innovations without any hindrance.
• Availability & Scalability:It can be hard to predict how your business needs will evolve, or if and when you will require extra resources for short term ‘bursts’ of traffic or transaction volume. Increased growth or other demands often lead to running applications with high load, or additional applications that most traditional hosting models cannot handle. Many organizations find it difficult to define and predict usage surges.
• Compliance & Risk Management:Every organization has to meet the pre-set compliance standards specific to their industry. One of the foremost concerns for businesses today pertains to the compliance standards of the cloud. Every time an organization moves data from the internal storage to a cloud platform, it has to maintain compliance with industry regulations and laws.
• Data Analytics: Data is the oil that drives modern-day business engines. With a shift to remote working, many organizations are still trying to fix their data centric processes such as data warehousing, data integration, data analysis and business intelligence.

How Microsoft Azure is helping Organizations cope with the challenges of the ‘New Normal’

In a recent post, Microsoft reported 775% increase in the Microsoft cloud usage since the COVID-19 outbreak. This positions Microsoft Azure as one of the fastest growing Cloud platforms on the planet today.

Microsoft Azure has been successful in transforming the way organizations operate and use technology to combat the challenges presented by the ‘New Normal’. It can help in mitigating some of the leading bottlenecks involved with the cloud transformation. How? Let us take a look:

• Enables Cloud Security: Organizations need a guarantee of security for their mission-critical infrastructure and Microsoft Azure can deliver exactly that. Azure offers powerful cloud security tools such as Azure VPN, Windows Virtual Desktop, and Microsoft Multi-factor Authentication, just to name a few. Tap into Microsoft’s Multi-factor Authentication to authenticate user logins each time or rapidly set up Azure VPN to allow secured access to on-prem sites.
• Allows Better Governance: Azure delivers mechanisms and processes to maintain control over your applications and resources in the cloud. It enables organizations to reduce costs and complexities of supporting the cloud environment. With its governance framework, Azure allows businesses to handle consumption and scale the environment efficiently while minimizing the operational and reputational risks from a security perspective.
• Delivers High Availability & Scalability: Azure provides high availability and redundancy utilizing Microsoft’s vast global footprint. With data centers located in all parts of the world, Azure can offer service level agreements guaranteeing 99.95 percent up time. That amounts to less than five hours of downtime per year. Azure can easily scale up by loading your applications as a cluster that allocates a web application to a specific set of processes. The result is that all of your applications are not forced to run off a single server and you will thus never run out of server capacity. As a bonus, Azure can even be managed to auto scale based on load or schedule.
• Helps in Compliance & Risk Management: The data stored in Azure complies with the regulations set for the particular industry. This is especially helpful for the legal or the finance sectors. It is entirely built around the security and privacy demands that any organization would need to adhere to.
• Empowers Innovation at Home: Azure allows remote working teams to quickly build, deploy and scale web apps and APIs through its Azure App service. Azure App Service is a fully managed “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) that integrates Microsoft Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services into a single service, adding new capabilities that enable integration with on-premises or cloud systems. It is a fully managed platform with built-in CI/CD integration and zero downtime deployments.
• Enables Data Analytics: In terms of analytics, Microsoft Azure provides one of the most comprehensive and integrated data analytics and data management platforms in the cloud, providing organizations with the ability to gather, store, process, analyze and visualize data of any variety, volume or velocity. Users can utilize various data assets to build transformative and secure analytical solutions at enterprise scale. Fully managed services like Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Data Factory, Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics help organizations easily deploy solutions for BI and reporting, advanced analytics and real-time analytics.

Want to Fast-track Your Azure Cloud Journey?

As a Microsoft certified Cloud Solutions Provider, AgreeYa has been enabling organizations to transition, manage and utilize Azure Cloud to achieve their intended business outcomes and mitigate existing technology challenges. We can assist you with our value-added services such as Workload Assessment and Roadmap Planning, System Center End Point Management Services, Data Warehousing & Integration, Disaster Recovery and Backup on Azure, App Migration to Azure and Cloud Managed Services. Contact us for more information.