Top 5 Crucial Azure Platform Tools and Services

Microsoft has been diligent over the years in providing robust tools as part of its cloud computing platform, Azure. These tools enhance everything from business, and finance, to DevOps automation and cloud management. Here we dive into some of these tools and how they can help improve the workflows and business operations for your firm.  

Azure Tools for Automation, DevOps, and Management

Building and setting up a cloud environment, powered by public cloud infrastructure and scalability, can take time. With the right tooling, you can improve any process you need to make your business more agile, resilient, and cloud-ready.  

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.  

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2. Azure DevOps / Azure DevOps Pipelines

These 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 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, Portfolio BI  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.

Ready to streamline your operations and capture multiple other benefits for your firm?  Through our cloud managed service, your teams can also gain access to code-based configuration and release management processes, proactive monitoring on critical production applications as well as unlimited 24×7 access to our cloud experts. Let’s Talk.