Why Choose Azure Over AWS

Looking to move to the cloud and not sure whether to go with Azure or AWS? Let me tell you why we choose Azure for our customers. 

Sure, AWS has been in the market longer and has a higher market share and more workload running on AWS than Azure, but you need to look at what that workload is. Microsoft is far outpacing all cloud providers when it comes to innovation and data centric workloads. It leads the pack in the data centric workloads like AI, big data and advanced analytics.

If you’re looking for cheap hosting, all cloud providers are the same. But getting cheap hosting is not a reason to move to the cloud. The reason to move to the cloud is to get your applications and your data and move them closer to the best services, integration and frameworks so you can use that data to accelerate your business.

Azure has gained our confidence because of 4 main areas:

1. Rate of Innovation

Microsoft is creating and adding things faster than anybody else. They’ve combined their giant engineering team with an amazing dev-ops organization and process. We’ve worked alongside these teams and have seen how they take your feedback about what you use and how you use it, and keep adding more features and functionality based on that.

2. Quality of Integration

If you’re running a traditional large-scale enterprise business environment that’s running on Windows AD and Office, there’s no other choice than Azure. Azure’s integration and the ability to do on-premises and in the cloud and make it all talk together is huge. Another benefit is the ability to do identity in the cloud and on-prem and make that run smoothly.

3. The Need for Hybrid

Every customer we have needs hybrid somewhere. There’s really no good hybrid solution in AWS. Microsoft data platforms and services are set up as real hybrid options. Their solutions are well thought out and they understand that hybrid is the way forward for most enterprises.

4. Support

As you get into hybrid, cloud or big data, you’re going to need support. While both AWS and Azure offer great support contracts and responsiveness, Azure has a huge community of people from every area of technology from data and data centers to infrastructure to App Dev to networking. They are coming from all over and are learning and growing at the same time you are.

There are lots of ways to connect to this community on Azure.com, with PASS, The Global Community for Data Professionals and our community here at Pragmatic Works, to name just a few. So, take advantage and get plugged in. Get free support and build connections that are going to help get your career, your architecture and platform to the next level.

For these reasons, we choose Azure for ourselves and recommend it to our customers, who are seeing incredible benefits. If you want to learn more on why we choose Azure and why you should too, or you just need help getting your cloud journey started, click the link below. Our remote services and Azure experts can help with every stage of your cloud journey.