INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
It’s time to move to the cloud
with Azure
/////////////////////////////
M
icrosoft Silver Certified Partner
Bluegrass Digital believes the
new Microsoft Azure data
centres in South Africa will reshape the
cloud environment in Africa and will now
provide the necessary infrastructure for rapid
cloud adoption.
Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of
cloud services to help businesses compete
on a global stage. It offers the freedom to
build, manage, and deploy applications on
an interconnected global network.
Being recently awarded with Microsoft
competencies in Azure Cloud Platform and
Azure Application Development, Bluegrass
CEO Nick Durrant says there are significant
savings for customers moving to Azure.
“We have been working on Azure for a
number of years through our UK office,
migrating client websites and applications
into Azure,” he said.
“Locally, we have been helping our clients
migrate their corporate website assets
into Azure and will continue to improve
and support them using a variety of Azure
services. With the new Azure data centres in
Johannesburg and Cape Town, Microsoft can
now deliver all the benefits of the cloud to a
local market at local pricing.”
IT OFFERS MANY
DIFFERENT
OPTIONS FOR APP
DEVELOPMENT IN
THE CLOUD.
56
INTELLIGENTCIO
With Azure, companies can now modernise
their applications with the flexibility of the
cloud and with low latency and the power
of these data centres, they can consider
things like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
Machine Learning.
Bluegrass has successfully migrated Costain’s,
UK’s leading smart infrastructure solutions
provider, website and Umbraco application
to Azure. Locally, it has also migrated various
Clover brand websites and microsites to Azure.
Durrant says Microsoft Azure offers the best
cloud platform, designed for developers to
build the most innovative apps.
“It offers many different options for app
development in the cloud. This is the second
wave of cloud computing – where you focus
on delivering the innovation your customers
demand, not the infrastructure required to
run them.”
Azure allows developers to host business
logic that can be executed without
managing or provisioning infrastructure. It
also provides a variety of ways to store data
– unstructured, archival, relational, and more.
Azure is a public cloud computing platform,
it is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and
Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as
a Service (SaaS) that can be used for services
such as analytics, virtual computing, storage
and networking.
Durrant says it can be used to replace or
supplement your on-premise servers.
“Azure is fast in terms of deployment,
operation and scalability,” he said.
“This gives the competitive advantage for the
companies to adopt Azure. Being the most up
Bluegrass Digital CEO Nick Durrant
to date cloud technology, the infrastructure
and applications could be made agile.
“Pay for what you use, not a fixed price for
fixed resources, often paying for services
you don’t need or not using. It is flexible,
move compute resources up and down
as needed and it supports almost any
OS, language, tool or framework. Azure is
reliable with 99.95% availability SLA and
24×7 tech support.
“Transform your business and reduce costs
with an energy-efficient infrastructure
spanning more than 100 highly secure
facilities worldwide, linked by one of the
largest networks on earth.
“Reduce the cost, the time and the complexity
of operating a global infrastructure while
meeting your local data residency needs.
Azure lets you deliver services at the scale you
need to reach your customers and partners,
wherever they are.” n
www.intelligentcio.com