It’s All Up in the Cloud
We’re now in the cloud era, where everything is up there in the cloud. Not the real cloud in the sky, but something similar in the sense that it exists and you can see it, but you can’t touch or hold it. Also, when something is in the cloud, you can access it anywhere so long as you have an internet connection. It is the popular concept nowadays because now more and more people are always on the go and applications can be used in handheld and portable devices. So a person can be in a coffee shop, but he or she can still do work and be able to access the files that are stored in the cloud. As time progresses, the number of work that we can do on the cloud only grows and grows.
One example is Azure, a cloud-computing service from Microsoft. In Microsoft Azure, you can build apps and deploy or use them wherever you want.
It is free to sign up for Azure, but you would need to pay for the services that you want to use. But you wouldn’t need to worry too much because you have the choice on the pricing, depending on how much you are going to use the service. Some applications can even be started from free.
The Azure products are categorized into the following: Compute, AI + Cognitive Services, Internet of Things, Networking, Storage, Web + Mobile, Containers, Databases, Data + Analytics, Enterprise Integration, Security + Identity, Developer Tools, Monitoring + Management, and Microsoft Azure Stack.
The products in the Compute category are Virtual Machines, Functions, Cloud Services, and more. We have used the Virtual Machine service, and it was effortless to set up and use. We can access the VM remotely anywhere so long as we have access and it was very convenient.
Azure also offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service which can be used to improve site performance. Aside from these, Azure also has an AI + Cognitive Services if you are interested in building AI apps. Included in the AI + Cognitive Services are Computer Vision API, Face API, Custom Speech Service, Custom Vision Service, and more. They are free to try if you want to do a test run first. And if you are into the Internet of Things or connecting everyday objects to the web, you may also do that in Azure.
Azure offers so many more products than I can discuss here so feel free to check it out by going to this link. We will be posting more about this in the future.
Send us your questions on Office 365