Microsoft Azure: Empowering Businesses Through Digital and App Innovation

Are you fully utilising the digital and app innovation of your Azure setup?

Microsoft Azure is more than a cloud solution; it’s a platform for you to build the applications that take your organisation to the next level. Azure has the power you need for digital and app innovation, enabling you to offer the experiences today’s customers demand, enhance collaboration within your organisation and be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the marketplace. The digital products or apps could be the differentiation points that set you apart from your competitors (1).

However, most organisations cannot say they’re using Azure’s full capabilities when it comes to digital and app innovation. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know enough about what Azure can do (Azure does offer more than 200 services (7), after all) or they lack the in-house expertise to formulate and execute a cloud strategy.

In this article, we’ll share five tips to help you harness the potential of Microsoft Azure to innovate, grow your business and boost efficiency. Let’s get started.

Tip 1 – Leverage Microsoft Azure for Cloud Computing Solutions

Building apps in the cloud offers several benefits, including scalability (you can easily upgrade the spec of your site to address extra demand or increase processing speed to complete tasks faster), cost efficiency (you only pay for what you use) and flexibility (you can add or remove services whenever you need to).

Azure offers a range of options for you to build and run applications in the cloud. These include:

Infrastructure as a Service – A traditional setup in the cloud delivering computing power, storage and networking on demand (2)
Platform as a Service – An end-to-end, cloud-native development and deployment environment. PaaS options include Azure App Services and Azure SQL
Serverless and container options – Build applications faster without having to manage infrastructure. Options include Azure Functions, Container Apps, Kubernetes, CosmosDB and SQL serverless

All these cloud-native options allow you to run powerful applications in the cloud. You also get the advantage that scaling is based on the number of transactions happening in your systems, so your spending directly tracks with use.

Tip 2 – Accelerate App Development with Azure’s DevOps Tools

Bringing together previously siloed teams (such as development, IT operations and security) to collaborate on projects together helps organisations move faster and produce better, more robust products. However, DevOps is more than a way to build products; it’s a culture shift (3).

Microsoft Azure delivers several tools to help you streamline the app development process and reap the rewards of DevOps in your organisation. These include:

Azure DevOps – Azure’s complete suite of DevOps solutions, from Boards to plan and track work to Pipelines where you build, test and deploy, this gives you everything you need to run a modern DevOps team
Azure Pipelines – Azure Pipelines have built-in integration with the Azure environment and can deploy seamlessly to Azure environments like app services
Azure App Services – Another option for building apps in Azure. Build, deploy and scale in a variety of programming languages

Other features in these tools include automated application release, as well as automated testing strategies like blue/green and canary deployments. To get the best outcomes with a speed of delivery never before seen, Azure and DevOps are the way to go.

Tip 3 – Harness the Power of AI and Machine Learning with Azure

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the cutting edge of development technology right now, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft Azure offers several tools and services to help you harness AI, drive innovation and gain a competitive edge in your industry. With its partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI and several substantial investments in AI solutions, Microsoft is an acknowledged leader in this space.

Azure AI studio is an exciting new low-code platform (4) providing all the tools you need to develop generative AI apps in one environment, including pre-built models which you can customise to match your needs. Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, is also available in Azure through Copilot studio, where you can customise the existing model or build your own Copilots. Behind the curtain, Azure also delivers the supporting infrastructure to build AI applications, such as Vector Databases and Azure AI Search.

With Azure, you can build cutting-edge AI products to power your organisation to new heights.

Tip 4 – Enhance Security and Compliance with Azure’s Built-in Features

In today’s environment of evermore sophisticated cyber-attackers employing ever-evolving methods to infiltrate systems, security is top-of-mind for all organisations. When you build digital or app innovations on Microsoft Azure, you can reap the rewards of speed and scalability without compromising on security. Azure is compliant with many different requirements and standards. Visit the Azure Compliance Center to download supporting statements and documents (8).

Every year, Microsoft invests billions of dollars in making its products as secure as possible. (In 2022 alone, they invested $4 billion (9)). As a result, Azure provides a number of multi-layered, built-in security measures and compliance certifications to help businesses protect their data and ensure regulatory compliance. Almost every possible security requirement is addressed. For example, if you’re an M365 user, you’ve got Entra ID, which is the Azure directory controlling logins and permissions to cloud services.

Azure Policy is Microsoft’s compliance tool, holding all your compliance data in one place so you can access it easily and reduce auditing time. You can also set guardrails for your resources, set new approval processes, and drive consistency (6). It’s another reason Azure is the place to build your digital experiences in 2024 – delivering real-time compliance at scale with consistent governance across your resources.

Tip 5 – Maximise Business Intelligence with Azure’s Data Analytics Tools

Data is the key to improvement in today’s organisations, and Azure’s tools produce large amounts of data. The key is extracting that data and analysing it to give you the insights you need to make data-driven decisions.

Microsoft Azure provides several business intelligence solutions to help you do just that, including:

Azure Synapse Analytics – An end-to-end enterprise analytics service delivering quicker time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. With limitless scale and multiple methods to query data, Synapse Analytics gets you to the answer faster than ever
Microsoft Fabric / Power BI – AI-powered data analytics solution that empowers all users to access, manage and act upon data. Fabric delivers data visualisation based on Power BI, as well as user-focused data storage workspaces based on Data Lake and SQL

Conclusion

Building digital and app innovation doesn’t just help you boost efficiency, create better customer experiences and scale your organisation; it lets you do it faster than ever. If you’re not fully utilising the digital and app innovation of your Azure setup, you’re missing out on massive benefits – and you could get left behind.

Of course, if your organisation lacks the right expertise, you might think harnessing the power of Azure digital and app innovation is beyond you. That’s when it’s time to talk to Doherty Associates.

We have the skills and experience to unlock Microsoft Azure’s potential and ensure it delivers maximum value to your business. This includes consultancy on digital and app innovation.

To find out more, visit our Azure service page.

Sources:

1- Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/app-digital-innovation#Solutionoverview – Digital and application innovation

2 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-iaas – What is IaaS?

3 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-devops – What is DevOps?

4 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-studio – AI Studio

5 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/explore/security – Azure Security

6 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/azure-policy – Azure Policy

7 – Microsoft – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-azure – What is Azure?

8 – Microsoft – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/compliance/ – Azure compliance documentation

9 – Nasdaq – https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-microsoft-is-building-its-security-business – How Microsoft is building its security business

Topics: Microsoft Azure and cloud