Why Azure

When it comes to being taken care of, we all want the best. The highest quality. A universally trusted service. That is just fact. When you go to the doctor, step into a classroom, or even go to the deli at the grocery store, you take solace in the sight of certification. Whether that be a doctorate degree hanging on the wall, or a bright blue “A” hanging laminated by the cash register. We want to know that we are being taken care of correctly, the first time. We want, or rather, we need to be able to trust the companies that we make exchanges with. That said, as humans, we are able to trust a company after it meets three precise, sometimes even unspoken, requirements: Efficiency, transparency, and longevity.

When you hear the name “Amazon”, it rings a bell in your head. Correct? That’s normal. It does for a majority of people. That is because Amazon has a brand that, through their marketing tactics, has quite literally “branded” the minds of people widespread. Amazon Web Services, a branch of Amazon that was launched in 2006, is a “pay-as-you-go” platform that provides a wide-range of individual cloud-computing services to consumers, including storage, gaming space, analytics etc. Amazon Web Services is a well-known platform because of its excellent ratings in efficiency/productivity over a long period of time. You can customize your usage to your business needs, and based on that, the cost will then be customized to your usage. It can be as useful and cost-effective as you make it.

So, now that you have heard a brief review of AWS, and it seems to be a well-performing service, you may be asking yourself, and we hope that you are, “Why Microsoft Azure?”. Azure, like AWS, is Microsoft’s individual cloud-computing service that was launched in 2010. If you compare and contrast the two platforms, you can see that they are both pay-as-you-go platforms. Both services are branches of reputable brands to certify that they are trustworthy platforms. Both services have also been publicly proven and labeled as efficient. What, though, makes Azure stand out, is its effective strategy of promoting transparency. If you were inquiring about these two platforms, you would find that with Amazon Web Services you must first create an account, search to find their pricing calculator, and then undergo a grueling technical, and to most, confusing, calculating process before you could get an estimate at what your personal spending would be. Azure, on the other hand, is the computing service for the person who does not speak “Tech”. The website is easy to navigate, requires no sign-up to get a cost estimate, and explains what you are getting and how you are getting it in specific, yet still, layman terms. Azure is actually 5 times more affordable with SQL than AWS. And there are more services/options available on Azure. Azure exceeds requirements in efficiency and effective communication/transparency. Although it was released four years after AWS, Azure still also exceeds the longevity requirement, with nine years of highly-rated service under its belt.

So, this begs the question: Is a service better just because it came out first? Azure proves otherwise.