What is Azure?

Microsoft Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables the management of applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres. It enables the Integration of public cloud applications with any current/legacy IT environment. We’ve included a some Azure services to provide an idea of what can be achieved… but talk to experts to find out more about Azure.

Azure benefits

Azure is a powerful tool that can be deployed for multiple solutions and situations. It provides an open framework on which to build applications, a platform to grow your business for a larger and more complex market. A way of increasing and managing your data security. And seeing the benefits of business operation; smoother scaling and transition which future proofs, adding a robust framework and security.

Azure Site Recovery

Every organisation needs a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. It keeps apps/data safe and available during planned and unplanned downtime, and recovers to normal working conditions as soon as possible.

Azure Site Recovery contributes to this plan by replicating on-premises virtual machines and physical servers. When outages occur in the primary site, you fail-over to the secondary site to keep workloads accessible and available. You fail back to your primary location when it returns to normal operations.

How Site Recovery helps;

• Simplifies the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Replicate, fail over and recover multiple workloads from a single location in the Azure portal. Site recovery orchestrates replication and failover, without intercepting application data.
• Eliminate a secondary Data Centre. Replicate workloads to Azure, rather than to a secondary site. Perform easy replication testing. Easily run test failovers to support disaster recovery drills, without affecting production environments.
• Fail over and recover. Run planned failovers for expected outages with zero-data loss, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency), for unexpected disasters. You can fail back to your primary site when it’s available again.

Azure Security Centre

Security Center helps to prevent, detect, and respond to threats with increased visibility. It provides integrated security monitoring and policy management across your Azure subscriptions, helps detect threats that might otherwise go unnoticed, and works with a broad ecosystem of security solutions.

How Security Centre works

Security Center delivers easy-to-use and effective threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities that are built in to Azure.

Prevention

• Monitors the security state of your Azure resources.
• Defines policies for your Azure subscriptions and resource groups based on your company’s security requirements, the types of applications that you use, and the sensitivity of your data.
• Uses policy-driven security recommendations to guide set-up of implementing needed controls.
• Rapidly deploys security services and appliances from Microsoft and partner.

Detection

• Automatically collects and analyses security data from your Azure resources, the network, and partner solutions like anti-malware programs and firewalls.
• Leverages global threat intelligence from Microsoft products and services, the Microsoft Digital Crimes
• Unit (DCU), the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), and external feed.
• Applies advanced analytics, including machine learning and behavioral analysis.

Responses

• Provides prioritised security incidents/alerts.
• Offers insights into the source of the attack and impacted resources.
• Suggests ways to stop the current attack and help prevent future attacks.

Azure Backup

Azure Backup is the Azure-based service for back-up, protection and restoration of data in the Microsoft cloud. Azure Backup replaces any existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution. It offers multiple components that are downloaded and deployed via computer, server, or in the cloud. And the component chosen is dependent upon what you want to protect. All Azure Backup components (no matter whether you’re protecting data on-premises or in the cloud) can be used to back up data to a Backup vault in Azure.

How Azure Backup helps

• Automatic storage management. Azure Backup automatically allocates and manages backup storage, and it uses a pay-as-you-use model.
• Unlimited scaling. Azure Backup uses the underlying power and unlimited scale of the Azure cloud to deliver high-availability with no maintenance or monitoring overhead. Set up alerts to provide information about events, but you don’t need to worry about high-availability for your data in the cloud.
• Multiple storage options. An aspect of high-availability is storage replication. Azure Backup offers two types of replication: locally-redundant storage and geo-replicated storage.
• Unlimited data transfer. No limit of the amount of inbound or outbound data you transfer. Azure Backup also does not charge for the data that is transferred.
• Data encryption. Allows for secure transmission and storage of your data in the public cloud. You store the encryption passphrase locally, and it is never transmitted or stored in Azure. If it is necessary to restore any of the data, only you have encryption passphrase, or key.
• Application-consistent backup. Whether backing up a file server, virtual machine, or SQL database, you need to know that a recovery point has all required data to restore the backup copy. Azure Backup provides application-consistent backups, which ensures additional fixes are not needed to restore the data.
• Long-term retention. Back up data to Azure for 99 years. Instead of switching backup copies from disk to tape, and then moving the tape to an off-site location for long-term storage, you can use Azure for short-term and long-term retention.

Enterprise Mobility with Azure

Help to keep your business secure from threats on every front: user access, devices, apps and data. Provide your team with the access, apps and familiar experiences across iOS, Android and Windows with built-in security that doesn’t get in the way.

Employees expect to have a seamless experience accessing company email and documents on their devices. But you want to keep data protected wherever it is. With EMS you can enable conditional access to Office 365 to help ensure that employees can only access data from devices that are managed and compliant based upon policies set by your IT. When employees try to access via unmanaged devices they are blocked, then provided with simple steps to quickly obtain access to email and other company resources.

How EMS helps

• Better Office management. EMS integrates with Office and is the only solution that brings managed mobile productivity with Office across platforms, with or without a device enrollment.
• Single identity for accessing company resources. EMS manages access, both on-premises and in the cloud, with a single identity.
• Extensive protection of corporate email and documents across four layers. EMS helps to protect at the identity, device, application, and data layers.