Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform for building, deploying and managing software applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres. Microsoft Azure is a highly flexible cloud platform that provides a wide range of products and services for hosting, storage, identity, security, data, analytics, AI and application development.
The decisions behind what you need to use within Azure are often guided by industry, security, compliance, size, and the scope of your application requirements. You can pick and choose the Azure services and products that best support what you want to develop, whether that is a website, API, portal, SaaS, product, data platform or connected business application.
Azure also continues to evolve, particularly around AI, automation, data and cloud-native application development. For businesses, the priority is not to use every new Azure feature, but to choose the services that genuinely support the application, data, security and integration requirements of the project.
In this article, we explore some key components and capabilities, including Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, through to Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Front Door, Azure Monitor, Azure Service Bus and Azure Stack.
What is Azure AD?
Azure Active Directory (AD), now called Microsoft Entra ID, is a cloud-based identity and access management service. In a business context, it helps you and your employees access internal and external resources securely. For example, when you log in to use Microsoft 365 or Office 365, Microsoft Entra ID may be used to authenticate that access.
In simple terms, it enables you to control access to applications based on your business requirements. You can use Microsoft Entra ID for multi-factor authentication when accessing important organisational resources. It can also be used for single sign-on, allowing users to access approved apps with their existing credentials.
What are the benefits of using Azure AD?
Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure AD, can help businesses:
- Protect users and data with built-in identity security and compliance features
- Use an enterprise identity service to reduce the risk of unauthorised access
- Simplify access to apps from different locations and devices
- Implement conditional access and multi-factor authentication to secure business data
- Ensure the right people have access to the right apps, resources and documents
- Provide a smoother user experience, with a quick and easy sign-in process
- Reduce time spent managing passwords and separate login processes
Microsoft Entra ID is beneficial for businesses of all sizes and across all industries, as every business needs a way to provide authorised access to all its digital assets and applications.
What is Azure Data Factory?
Azure Data Factory is a fully managed, serverless data integration service. It enables the integration of big data and primarily supports two functions: moving data and transforming data. In this way, it acts as an orchestration tool for data workflows.
With Azure Data Factory you can create data-driven workflows to consume data from different data stores. This data can then be transformed visually with data flows or through compute services such as Azure Databricks and Azure SQL Database.
Consider a use case within the gaming industry, where a gaming company collects vast amounts of gaming logs and wants to analyse the data to gain insights into customer preferences, usage behaviour and opportunities for growth or upsell. Azure Data Factory can support data scenarios like this, where a large amount of consumer data needs to be moved, transformed and analysed to help drive business decisions.
Key benefits of Azure Data Factory:
Azure Data Factory can help businesses:
- Manage data integration in a cost-effective way, with a pay-as-you-go approach
- Scale data workflows on demand
- Orchestrate and monitor data at scale
- Consume data from different sources using built-in connectors
- Support complex extract-transform-load and extract-load-transform projects
- Reduce manual work when moving data between systems
Azure Data Factory is built for complex ETL, ELT and data integration projects. It comes with its own pricing, allowing businesses to pay for only what they need.
What is Azure Sentinel?
Microsoft Sentinel, formerly Azure Sentinel, is Microsoft’s cloud-native security information and event management solution.
It allows you to collect data across users, devices, applications and infrastructure. It detects and investigates threats using analytics and AI-supported capabilities. For large enterprises, this can make threat detection and response faster and more manageable.
In summary, Microsoft Sentinel helps businesses monitor for suspicious activity at scale.
Key benefits of using Azure Sentinel:
Microsoft Sentinel can help businesses:
- Respond to incidents rapidly using built-in orchestration and automation
- Use security expertise and threat intelligence to identify real threats more quickly
- Simplify security operations
- Speed up threat response
- Access behaviour analytics to stay ahead of evolving threats
- Improve visibility across cloud, users, devices and applications
What is Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is a data and AI service available through Microsoft Azure, offering a unified and open platform for data. With Azure Databricks, data scientists, data engineers and analysts can run interactive and scheduled data analysis workloads.
It is used by companies to process and transform significant amounts of data, as well as to explore data through machine learning.
Azure Databricks includes several components that strengthen its capability:
- Databricks Data Science & Engineering: a workspace designed to support collaboration between data engineers, data scientists and machine learning engineers.
- Databricks Machine Learning: an integrated machine learning platform where teams can train models and track training parameters.
- Databricks SQL: allows teams to run quick, ad-hoc queries on data.
What is Azure Synapse Analytics?
Azure Synapse Analytics is a comprehensive analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. Data can be queried at scale for business intelligence and machine learning requirements.
It is commonly used in financial services for fraud detection. An end-to-end analytics solution can help financial institutions monitor activity across accounts and devices to detect fraud earlier and keep customers protected.
You can manage resources and costs for this type of end-to-end solution by only paying for the capabilities you use.
What is Azure Data Lake?
Azure Data Lake makes it easier for developers, data scientists and analysts to store data of different sizes and types. It offers flexibility and speed for processing and analytics across platforms and languages.
Using Azure Data Lake means there is no infrastructure to manage. You can process data on demand, scale as required and pay per job.
Azure Data Lake Solutions can be built on:
- HDInsight: This runs popular open-source frameworks using Azure HDInsight for enterprise-grade open-source analytics.
- Data Lake Analytics: This provides an on-demand analytics job service with per-second billing.
- Azure Data Lake Storage: This acts as a single data storage platform and enables data to be ingested across tools such as Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics and HDInsight.
Azure Data Lake Solutions integrates with:
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure HDInsight
- Azure Databricks
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Power BI
What is Azure Blob Storage?
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft’s storage solution for the cloud. Any application or website that needs to store data can use Azure Blob Storage.
It is designed for:
- Storing files for distributed access
- Streaming video and audio
- Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery and archiving
- Serving of images or documents directly to a browser
Azure Blob Storage is scalable, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. A small business website may use it to store web images and documents, while an enterprise-level organisation may need it to store a significant amount of files or perform system backups for its applications.
A key benefit of using Azure Blob Storage is that it enables businesses to collect and store digital assets, such as media, files and documents, in one central place. These assets can then be served to multiple devices and applications at scale. Its speed, security and ease of access make it an attractive option for small, medium and large organisations.
What is Azure Data Studio?
Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform data tool that enables the use of cloud data platforms. It runs on Windows, Linux and macOS.
Its portability is a key benefit as it provides a data visualisation platform that makes it easier to bring datasets from different places into one central environment. This information can then be made easier to understand and work with.
Azure Data Studio provides a built-in query editor and customisable dashboards, helping database specialists create a more suitable work environment.
It is a solution for those looking to:
- Create database diagrams quickly or visualise result sets
- Execute and edit queries
- Bring in data from other cloud platforms
What is Azure Front Door?
Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) that helps deliver a secure user experience for content and applications.
Key capabilities of Azure Front Door include:
- Integration with a range of Azure services, such as Azure Web Apps
- Support for performance and scalability
- Protection for apps and digital assets through security services, including web application firewall, bot protection and DDoS protection
Azure Front Door is used when delivering content, files, apps or APIs. It helps deliver a secure experience to users wherever they are.
Reasons for using Azure Front Door:
- Building and managing modern internet first architecture with the required levels of reliability and security
- To scale out and improve the performance of apps
- To use Microsoft’s dedicated private global network to support network reliability
Any organisation with applications that reach local or global users can use Azure Front Door to help keep the application and its users protected while supporting high availability.
What is Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor helps maximise the availability and performance of applications and services. It collects, aggregates and analyses metrics, logs and traces to send relevant alerts and notifications.
This information helps you understand how your apps are performing and enables proactive action of identifying issues that affect them and the resources that depend on them.
The benefits of Azure Monitor:
Azure Monitor can help businesses:
- Detect and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies
- Deep dive into monitoring data via log analytics to support troubleshooting and diagnoses
- Create visualisations with Azure dashboards
- Understand how users are interacting with applications
- Monitor resource usage and application health
The types of data Azure Monitor can collect:
Azure Monitor can collect data at different levels, including:
- Application level, for performance and functionality of code
- Azure resources level, to capture data about the operation of Azure resources
- Azure subscription level, for the operation and management of a subscription
- Azure tenant level, to understand Azure services in use, such as Microsoft Entra ID
Applications and services running in Microsoft Azure are often complex pieces of software that are comprised of many moving components.
It is important to track how users are using the system, monitor resource usage and assess the overall health and performance of an application. With monitoring in place, the data collected can be used to detect and correct potential issues before they become larger problems.
What is Azure Arc?
Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform, enabling you to build apps and services that can run across multiple datacentres.
It is designed for businesses that need to manage resources deployed within Azure and outside Azure through the same interface. It enables organisations with legacy infrastructure to join the hybrid cloud approach by implementing Azure Arc.
Azure Arc provides two key benefits:
- Management of data services can be centralised from within Azure, providing efficiencies
- It provides a single point of administration for IT specialists, developers, data scientists and analysts
What is Azure Service Bus?
Azure Service Bus is a cloud-based messaging service that transfers messages between applications and databases securely.
Key Benefits of using Azure Service Bus:
Azure Service Bus can help businesses:
- Use a reliable cloud messaging service
- Make complicated messaging workflows simpler through routing capabilities
- Safely route and transfer data and control
- Load-balance work across competing consumers
- Support more reliable communication between connected systems
What is Azure Stack?
Azure Stack is a portfolio of products that extends Azure services and capabilities to the environment of your choice. This means you can build, deploy and run applications across a diverse set of infrastructures, including public cloud and on-premise environments.
It enables organisations to hold sensitive data and information within their own data centres while still using Azure public cloud capabilities. Azure Stack includes a variety of Azure services that can be hosted in an on-premise data centre, such as Azure App Services, Azure Functions and Microsoft Entra ID for managing identities.
The core benefits of Azure Stack
Azure Stack can support:
- A more seamless process for deploying across the cloud and your own data centres
- A consistent user experience across environments
- Consistency for end users
- Greater flexibility for organisations that cannot move entirely to public cloud
Azure Stack is for organisations and businesses whose operations either won’t benefit from or cannot move entirely to Azure cloud in its current form.
Get the most out of Microsoft Azure
I‑Finity is recognised by Microsoft as a Silver Partner with a certified competency in their Cloud Platform. This means the skills and expertise we have within our team, and the Azure implementations we have in place, have been recognised through our Microsoft partnership status.
Our team has been building, deploying and managing apps within the Azure platform using a range of Azure products and services for over 10 years. During this time, we have architected, designed and built applications on Azure using a range of products and services, including Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Front Door, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Monitor and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
To get the most out of Microsoft Azure, it is important to choose the right services for your application, rather than using features in isolation. This means thinking carefully about what your system needs to do, how users will access it, how data will be stored and protected, and how performance will be monitored over time.
Key areas to consider include:
- Secure access and authentication: Use identity and access management tools such as Microsoft Entra ID to make sure only authorised users can access your apps, data and APIs. For example, I-Finity used Azure Active Directory to support authentication for TrackMySSL.com, including API authentication to ensure only authorised identities can perform actions on the app.
- Performance and scalability: Use services such as Azure Front Door to support a secure user experience while allowing applications to scale. This can be especially important for apps, websites and APIs that need to serve users reliably across different locations.
- Storage and backup: Choose the right storage approach for your files, documents, imagery and media assets. Azure Blob Storage can support scalable storage, backup, restore and disaster recovery. For one photography website, I-Finity used Azure Blob Storage to support a growing collection of images that needed to be stored and served efficiently.
- Monitoring and compliance: Use Azure Monitor to proactively track, assess and detect potential issues before they become a problem. This is particularly important in regulated sectors such as financial services, where applications need to be monitored, compliant and protected.
- Security recommendations and protection: Use Microsoft Defender for Cloud, formerly Azure Security Centre, to strengthen security and support ongoing protection. With online threats continuously evolving, cloud security should be reviewed and improved over time.
- Cost optimisation: Review your Azure implementation regularly to make sure it remains efficient as your application grows. For one financial services customer, I-Finity’s Azure work supported operational efficiencies, including cost savings through optimising the Azure implementation.
With I Finity, you have the expertise to design the optimal technical architecture on Azure, implementing the components, products and services that best support your application, business and end-user needs.
Want to learn more about Azure? Visit our Azure Cloud Services page or contact us to discuss your specific needs.
