Microsoft Bolsters UK Azure Cloud Service

Microsoft has expanded the number of Azure-related cloud services it offers UK customers, as the firm continues to promote its cloud-centric vision going forward.

It comes after Microsoft confirmed this week that it will cut 4,000 jobs across its global workforce, with most of the job losses expected to come from the sales teams of its traditional desktop and server software.

Those job cuts come on top of Redmond’s brutal exit from the smartphone sector, which saw it axing thousands of jobs associated with its acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business.

Azure Services

Microsoft under the leadership of Satya Nadella however now has a fierce focus on cloud services such as Office 365 and Azure.

To this end it has announced a number of new services for UK customers, as revealed in blog post by Andres Juarez, Principal Program Manager of Redmond’s Global Ecosystem.

These new Azure services include the Azure Container Service, which is designed to help those customers who are running containers in production environments. Customers can opt to use open source technology, tools, and skills, and production container-based applications can be deployed in just a few clicks.

Another new service is Azure Log Analytics, which is a service in the Operations Management Suite (OMS) offering that monitors a customer’s cloud and on-premises environments to maintain availability and performance. It does this by gathering data generated by resources in the customer’s hybrid cloud environments and from other monitoring tools.

Logic Apps meanwhile offers a way to simplify and implement scalable integrations and workflows in the cloud. A visual designer models and automates processes as a series of steps known as a workflow.

Another service is Azure Stream Analytics, which is a fully managed and real-time event processing engine, designed to provide insights from data.

Other Azure services include SQL Threat Detection (provides a new layer of security by providing security alerts on anomalous activities); SQL Data Sync Public Preview (allows for the synchronization of data across multiple SQL Server and SQL Database instances); and finally Managed Disks Storage Service Encryption to help firms meet their security and compliance commitments.

Last month Microsoft acquired Cloudyn, a company that helps enterprises and managed service providers optimise their investments in cloud services.

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