Microsoft public cloud services can help your business in lots of ways. Most notably, they can save you money. For one thing, by using Microsoft public cloud services, you can avoid purchasing expensive servers. With cloud services, you can run your business by using devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and printers. You can also scale back your IT staffing. After all, less hardware to support means a smaller in-house staff to support it. But there are other, less obvious savings. For example, if your business uses cloud services, your staff might be able to work from home on a permanent basis. That will help you save on your lease, utility bills, garbage services, and office supplies.
Using Microsoft public cloud services can also help you grow your business. You can use the money you save to invest in other areas of your business, like people and marketing. As your business grows, you can scale up your use of these services.
Perhaps most importantly, with Microsoft public cloud services, you can focus on your business, not on the technology needed to run it. These services are always on and always connected. You pay only for what you consume, by using a transparent infrastructure that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year to meet the needs of your business.
Unlike your staff, Microsoft public cloud services never take a vacation. Moreover, these services are constantly evolving, bringing more up time, elasticity, scale, on-demand networking, computing, and storage.
Throughout the rest of this book, you’ll explore using several Microsoft public cloud-based tools to run your business. These include the following:
■ Microsoft Azure Azure is the Microsoft cloud platform, offering a collection of compute, storage, data, networking, and app services. It is both an IaaS and a PaaS and is used to build, deploy, and manage apps and websites.
■ Azure Site Recovery With Azure Site Recovery, employees can back up or replicate and recover important data.
■ Azure RemoteApp With RemoteApp, employees can access desktop programs on their local computers from any Internet-connected laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
■ Office 365 Office 365 makes all the Office programs that office workers know so well (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher) available online on a subscription basis.
■ Microsoft Intune With Microsoft Intune, employees can gain protected access t corporate programs, data, and resources from virtually anywhere, using almost any device.
■ Microsoft Skype for Business With this cloud service, employees can easily place audio and video calls and exchange instant messages.
■ Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Drive sales and marketing with this online customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
■ Yammer Services With this private social network tool, employees can quickly self- organize, collaborate, and make decisions.
■ Office 365 Video Use this video-streaming service to bring world-class video streaming to your organization.
■ Server Manager With this tool, you can view and manage your server’s productivity both in the cloud and on-premises.
■ OneDrive for Business With OneDrive for Business, you can securely store all your files and share them with coworkers. Files can be synchronized across all your devices, so that you can access them anywhere, anytime, whether you’re online or not.
■ Windows App Studio Want to create an app? Then App Studio is for you. With App Studio, you can quickly build, test, and share Windows and Windows Phone apps.
