Azure Trends Emerge

Recent Azure additions and enhancements show trends in areas where organizations could find opportunities to build new solutions or improve existing ones. Microsoft has largely driven the evolution by building on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure and by expanding and advancing Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) portfolio. It also has substantially updated the management technology and options for on-premises deployment of Azure infrastructure and solutions. The improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment experiences, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes.

Database Landscape and Big Data

Microsoft’s database landscape has broadened over the past few years and now includes on-premises products and Microsoft-hosted services that enable ingestion, management, integration, and analysis of relational and nonrelational data sources. The products and services can also process Big Data sources such as Web logs, sensor readings, account transaction activity, and social media feeds, which contain unprocessed data that could provide insights to solve business problems.