Are your business’s critical applications hosted on an aging server that everyone is afraid to touch in case something goes wrong? Have you been putting off upgrading your server because of worries about downtime, cost, and disruption? 

The bad news is that you will have to bite the bullet sooner or later. The good news is that there are better hosting options than colocated servers with substantial upfront costs or leased servers that will eventually become obsolete.

Microsoft Azure is an enterprise-grade cloud platform capable of fulfilling the application hosting requirements of businesses of all sizes, from entrepreneurs to global corporations. It’s perfect if all you want is to lift an application onto a flexible virtual machine, but Azure also includes a huge variety of cloud services for everything from databases and machine learning to world-class developer tools.

Did you know that you can migrate your applications to Microsoft Azure for free? We’ll explain how at the end of this article.

Scalability

Your physical servers aren’t going to get any more powerful — or less powerful for that matter. As your business grows, your servers stay the same. Of course, you can buy bigger servers, but that’s expensive. Any server you buy will have to include room to grow, so you’re paying for unutilized resources.

On Azure, you can choose any size of server and adjust its resources as your requirements evolve. You can scale up and down at will and deploy additional servers as the need arises.

Reliability

Azure’s Service Level Agreement for Virtual Machines promises 99.9 percent availability for single-instance Virtual Machines, and 99.99 percent availability for VMs deployed in more than one Availability Zone, something that’s easily achieved. Outages happen, but they’re rare events on a platform with multiple network and infrastructure redundancies.

Familiarity

If your business uses Microsoft products such as Exchange and Office 365, then you’re already familiar with the Microsoft design language and user experience, which is replicated throughout Azure.

Security

Security is often a key concern for businesses contemplating cloud migration. In reality, cloud platforms are typically more secure than self-managed physical servers. The best engineers in the industry work on the software, hardware, and security of Azure. It’s packed with security features, including data security and encryption, auditing, malware scanning, security monitoring, and more.

It’s Free

VIAcode will migrate your application to Microsoft Azure for free. Our migration engineers will assess your current infrastructure situation, replicate it on Azure, and migrate the application and its dependencies to Azure Virtual Machines with minimal downtime. You gain all the benefits we’ve discussed in this article and pay for nothing except the Azure infrastructure.

We have several migration programs, funded by Microsoft, including free application migration, free System Center migration, and free migration for SQL 2008 and Windows 2008.

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