Embracing the computing power of Azure

South African companies can start realising significant business benefits now by utilising the high-performance computing capabilities of the locally available Microsoft Azure data centres even if they haven’t migrated any data to the cloud yet.There is a range of capabilities available in Azure that simply do not exist in an on-premises environment at an equivalent price point – such as enterprise scale artificial intelligence. An organisation can easily get access to high-end computational services, such as Azure Databricks (an Apache Spark-based analytics platform), capable of running complex machine learning scripts at incredibly high speeds that would be cost-prohibitive using on-premises systems.Furthermore, these services can be turned on and off whenever required. The client, therefore, only pays for usage and there are no expenses associated with servers sitting idle.However, although it’s not necessary to have the bulk of organisational data in the cloud for this type of activity, there will be costs associated with continually transferring terabytes into Azure for computation. At Altron Karabina, we therefore believe the time is right to start moving corporate data into the local Azure cloud permanently the platform has definitely proved itself.