Within the region there has been significant adoption of Microsoft Azure both in public cloud usage, as well as hybrid cloud usage. This has facilitated increasing usage of applications both in the datacentre as well as from Microsoft Azure in the cloud. This suite of applications covers web and mobile, analytics, storage and backup, data developer services, hybrid integration, management, and commerce.
According to Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Business Group Lead, Microsoft Gulf, the adoption started a couple of years back with customers trying to experience Azure. Later the first workloads to be moved to Microsoft Azure were backup and disaster recovery.
“Mission critical and business applications using customer transactional data require backup and disaster recovery services and this can be provided by the Microsoft Azure cloud. As enterprises began to understand the benefits of using Microsoft Azure, including scalability, availability of resources, agility, and edge of innovation, they started to move production workloads into Azure”, he explains.
Enterprises from retail, oil and gas, manufacturing, banking and finance, vertical market segments have moved production workloads including mission critical applications like ERP into Microsoft Azure, according to Ozyucel. Since Microsoft Azure provides highly elastic services this is useful for mission critical and business applications to meet end of year demands and spikes generated by holiday seasons. “Instead of investing in an environment to meet peak demand, they can use the public cloud on Microsoft Azure and this is one of the biggest promises,” elaborates Ozyucel.
Microsoft Azure suite of services is available as Iaas and Paas, and includes Office 365 and enterprise mobility suite. Microsoft Azure Iaas suite of services includes virtual machines, virtual networks and storage, and for enterprises this is easier to adopt. This enables the core IT teams to focus on business intelligence, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, driving organizational agility.
Microsoft Azure is an open cloud environment that is good not only for Microsoft but other vendors as well including Red Hat, CloudEra and SAP, amongst others. “Azure is growing each and every month and we are adding new features,” explains Ozyucel.
