Business innovation with Azure

While cloud computing environments such as Azure have been around for 10 years now, the tipping point for cloud adoption by enterprises was seen around 2016, where for the first time an IDG survey found that over half of the IT environments of surveyed businesses were hosted in the cloud¹.

The "first generation" of cloud adoption was characterized primarily by the deployment of virtual datacenters. In this first generation, organizations deployed new or migrated existing virtual machine workloads into Azure for a variety of reasons: some migrated to the public cloud to save on datacenter-running costs, while others wanted to take advantage of the easier and faster method for the deployment of infrastructure. Other organizations looked to Azure to streamline their business processes, to use it as a test setup, or to use the cloud as an affordable disaster recovery solution. For others, the huge potential for performance and scale, as well as flexibility (especially during peak usage), were the core reasons for adopting Azure.

The "second generation" of the public cloud arrived when rather than purely seeing value in running and managing virtual machines, some organizations saw benefit and innovation in moving to platform services. This mainly removes the focus and dependency on virtual machines, networking, and storage, and switches to a new approach with the core focus being on the application itself. Since platform services don't require much infrastructure, they are easier to manage. There is also less time spent patching or maintaining servers, which typically results in the improved uptime of your applications as well.

A "third generation" is currently in its early stages, where organizations are adopting serverless and microservices, as well as using native cloud services to build cognitive solutions and artificial intelligence solutions. Azure makes it easy to deploy these kinds of back-end services, where less and less knowledge is needed to build the underlying infrastructure. For most of these services, there is not much, sometimes even nothing, to manage on the infrastructure side.

Azure, at its heart, is a public cloud platform, but there are a variety of different cloud models available in the industry today. Let's run through the main ones.