Today plenty of businesses still have real concerns about migrating applications to the cloud. Fears about network security, availability, and potential downtime swirl through the heads of chief decision makers. Enter Microsoft Azure, the industry leader’s solution for going to a partially or totally cloud-based architecture. Microsoft has leveraged its constantly-expanding worldwide network of data centres to create Azure, a cloud platform for building, deploying, and managing services and applications, anywhere. Azure lets you add cloud capabilities to your existing network through its platform as a service (PaaS) model or entrust Microsoft with all of your computing and network needs with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Either option provides secure, reliable access to your cloud hosted data—one built on Microsoft’s proven architecture. Azure provides an ever-expanding array of products and services designed to meet all your needs through one convenient, easy to manage platform. Below are just some of the capabilities Microsoft offers through Azure and tips for determining if the Microsoft cloud is the right choice for your organisation.
Our experience of developing business solutions over a number of years, adding functionality as the solution evolved, has enabled us to look at the structure of our solutions more objectively, and has presented us the opportunity to recategorise the features and functionality in a better and more logical way. It also allows us to be more innovative and flexible with regards to development of new functionality and integration to other solutions.
The Retail Connect & EPOS Connect are Vardells solutions primarily based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Azure provides the best hosting platform for .NET due to Microsoft’s in-depth knowledge of the framework. Additionally, Azure provides better options for using Microsoft SQL Server in the cloud in terms of both management and pricing. Using the very latest technology such as Azure, enables us to create a more configurable and scalable solution for the end user. This should negate the need for actual development work other than that of adding completely new functionality, ensuring that budgets are spent on advancement and not maintenance.
Vardells has a wealth of experience in facilitating our solutions which integrate seamlessly with core financial ERP and eCommerce systems. The approach varies depending on the functional requirements of the solution, the system or systems to be integrated with and the organisational environment.
Vardells professional services and integration team have considerable expertise in providing tailored solutions with tight integrations using the range of methodologies.
Many of our existing solutions are deployed on physical servers on-premise software are installed and runs on computer servers located at the on-site premises of the business or organisation. This houses the software, rather than a remote virtual facility such as the cloud.
Vardells Data centre hosting is the process of deploying housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more of your business websites. It enables the use of the same services, features and capabilities of a data centre; but from a hosted platform external to the on-premises IT infrastructure. Most importantly for your business, more so than the computer space provided for your website files, is the fast and reliable connection it provides to the Internet, via T-carrier system lines.
A hybrid cloud solution is one where an organisation uses a mix of on-premises private cloud and public cloud services. It can offer flexibility as it allows workloads to shift between the two when capacity and costs change. Sensitive workloads and data can be hosted in the private cloud, with less critical workloads hosted in a public cloud. If a company has regulatory requirements for data handling and storage, then this can be provided in the private cloud. Or perhaps an organisation could host its e-commerce site within a private cloud and their corporate site within the public cloud. Public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services provide scalability, giving an organisation the ability to pay only for the resources it consumes. The important thing is to have the technology in place to allow the two clouds to connect and interact.
