Microsoft has been diligent over the years in providing a great variety of tools as part of its cloud computing platform, Azure. Enhancing everything from business, and finance, to DevOps automation and cloud management. We take the time to dive into some of these useful Azure tools and how they can help improve your workflow and business operations.
Azure Tools for Automation, DevOps, and Management
Building and setting up a cloud environment, powered by public cloud infrastructure and scalability, can take some time. With the right tooling, you can improve any process you need to make your business more agile, resilient, and cloud-ready. Before utilizing any of the following tools, you might need to go over the best steps and practices for cloud adoption.
Another important point to ensure cloud enablement is to establish automation. As a process, automation is divided into configuration management and orchestration. The process is vital for many aspects of your cloud-based business. For instance, if you have set up 30 or 40 virtual machines in an Azure environment, having cloud automation tools and cloud management tools helps to ensure each one of these systems is updated and patched to the latest version. When your automation tool notices one of the VMs is not patched, it simply applies the updates automatically.
1. Azure Automation
Utilizing Azure Automation enables you to merge orchestration and configuration management operations. Admins rely on this tool to create runbooks to carry out management tasks efficiently. The tool also gives you a chance to easily provision the necessary infrastructure and create webhooks (Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are integrated to allow this feature). Scaling up a database, for instance, can be run by a technician who does not have access to the environment. Learn more about Azure Automation.
2. Azure DevOps / Azure DevOps Pipelines
These handy tools will allow you to incorporate automation for your CI/CD pipeline. With CI/CD you are automating code development and deployment while keeping an eye on every single detail. If an environment is more complex, you can make any necessary adjustments fast.
3. Azure Virtual Machines
Having a Virtual Machine (VM) via Microsoft Azure is a powerful cornerstone for a lot of businesses out there. In basic terms, it means you are making the most out of contemporary cloud computing. How? Easy. You are utilizing your own machine or system without having to spend on purchasing or maintaining physical equipment. Whatever your business needs to host applications or websites, or development, with Azure VMs.
4. Azure Active Directory
In terms of modern-day cybersecurity, Azure Active Directory (AD) contains all you need to secure account activity via identity management. Providing a mix of sign-in and multi-factor authentication, in addition to other security features, it is the best way of ensuring solid protection for your business environment. If you need further guidance on Azure Active Directory, Hentsu engineers have discussed tips and valuable info on Device Protection, Conditional Access, Compliance, and more.
5. Business Intelligence Tools
Relying on business intelligence tools like Power BI from Microsoft unlocks a wide range of benefits. One of the biggest advantages, of course, is the ability to accumulate and process data efficiently. After that, you can further organize your data, analyze, make dashboards, reports, and various visualizations. This tool is focused on improving specific aspects of your business operations: keeping an eye on market trends, precisely monitoring KPIs, and more.
Other Cloud Valuable Azure Tools
In addition to everything mentioned above, other helpful Azure tools are available, such as MS Azure Storage (allocating necessary storage for your business), Azure Backup (back up data safely), Azure Site Recovery (cost-effectively ensuring business continuity and data protection via site recovery) and more.
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