Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is one the world's leading cloud platforms, enabling scalable, flexible and cost-effective development of new services. Solita is a Microsoft partner with a rare Azure Expert MSP certification. We help you in Microsoft Azure cloud migration, cloud strategy, cloud governance and application operations, and to create complete end-to-end services on the Azure.

As longstanding partners, Solita and Microsoft help Nordic companies in moving to Microsoft Azure cloud, and creating data-intensive services on Azure. Solita is a Microsoft Gold partner and Azure Expert Managed Services Provider. Our certified experts provide customers with world-class expertise to support their journey to cloud and help them build modern operating models for cloud service management. Our Solita CloudBlox® service helps customers manage complex multi-provider cloud environments, including their capacity, costs, information security, operation and development.

Why Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure allows you to devote more resources to customer-focused innovation, giving you the tools to succeed in today’s fast-paced, application-based economy.

  • A widely used cloud ecosystem with mature services for information management and analytics needs
  • Develop and deploy where you want, with the only consistent hybrid cloud on the market. Extend Azure on-premises with Azure Stack.
  • Azure has a fully integrated delivery pipeline
  • Cost-effective scalability and elasticity – stop guessing when you’re capacity planning!
  • Flexibility in adapting to different business requirements – go global in minutes!
  • Secure and reliable, excelling typical on-premise datacentres – remove complicated infrastructure management that adds little business value
  • Move away from risk-laden up-front expense to flexible variable expense* Create intelligent apps using powerful data and artificial intelligence services

Read more how to start your cloud migration and manage cloud services

Azure Solutions

Our Azure solutions are designed according to the best practices from Microsoft Azure Cloud Design patterns. We pay special attention to the following key characteristics:

  • Availability

    Availability is the proportion of time that the system is functional and working, usually measured as a percentage of uptime. It can be affected by system errors, infrastructure problems, malicious attacks and system load. Cloud applications typically provide users with a service level agreement (SLA), so applications must be designed to maximise availability.

  • Data Management

    Data management is the key element of cloud applications and influences most of their quality attributes. Data is typically hosted in different locations and across multiple servers for reasons such as performance, scalability or availability, and this can present a range of challenges. For example, data consistency must be maintained, and data will typically need to be synchronised across different locations.

  • Design and Implementation

    Good design encompasses factors such as consistency and coherence in component design and deployment, maintainability to simplify administration and development, and reusability to allow components and subsystems to be used in other applications and scenarios. Decisions made during the design and implementation phase have a huge impact on the quality and total cost of owning cloud-hosted applications and services.

  • Messaging

    The distributed nature of cloud applications requires a messaging infrastructure that connects the components and services, ideally in a loosely coupled manner to maximise scalability. Asynchronous messaging is widely used and offers many benefits, but also brings challenges such as the ordering of messages, poison message handling, idempotency, and more.

  • Management and Monitoring

    Cloud applications run in in a remote datacentre in which you do not have full control of the infrastructure or, in some cases, the operating system. This can make management and monitoring more difficult than an on-premises deployment. Applications must expose runtime information that administrators and operators can use to manage and monitor the system, as
    well as supporting changing business requirements and customisation without requiring the application to be stopped or redeployed.

  • Performance and Scalability

    Performance is an indication of a system’s responsiveness in executing any action within a given timeframe, while scalability is a system’s ability either to handle increases in load with no impact on performance or to readily increase available resources. Cloud applications typically encounter variable workloads and peaks in activity. Predicting these, especially in a multi-tenant scenario, is almost impossible. Instead, applications should be able to scale out within limits to meet peaks in demand, and scale in when demand decreases. Scalability concerns not just compute instances, but other elements such as data storage, messaging infrastructure, and more.

  • Resiliency

    Resiliency is a system’s ability to smoothly handle and recover from failures. The nature of cloud hosting, where applications are often multi-tenant, use shared platform services, compete for resources and bandwidth, communicate over the Internet and run on commodity hardware, means there is an increased likelihood that both transient and more permanent faults will arise. Detecting failures, and recovering quickly and efficiently, is necessary for maintaining resiliency.

  • Security

    Security is a system’s capacity to prevent malicious or accidental actions outside the designed usage and to prevent disclosure or loss of information. Cloud applications are exposed on the Internet outside trusted on-premises boundaries, are often open to the public, and may serve untrusted users. Applications must be designed and deployed to protect them from malicious attacks, restrict access to approved users and protect sensitive data.

Migrate to Azure

Cloud migration is a key ingredient in today’s digital business transformation. It helps to accelerate the speed of delivery, reliability, and cost-efficiency. We help our customers to quickly migrate to Microsoft cloud with the help of world-class experts and a high level of automation. Cloud migration consists of the following phases:

  • 1

    Strategy

    Strategy and roadmap to support your cloud journey. What is the goal, what should be achieved, what is the time frame, and how we get there.

  • 2

    Assessment

    Evaluation of the applications running on-premises and choosing the best approach and candidates to be migrated into the cloud.

  • 3

    Analyse

    Deep dive into the applications to find out how they are built and how the migration should be done.

  • 4

    Execute

    Actual migration done with lift-and-shift, containers or with serverless solutions on top of solid cloud foundation, e.g. like Solita CloudBlox – managed cloud.

Watch recording: Foster digital innovation with solid data foundation

Cases Posti and Volvo Cars

How to transform your data assets to a solid foundation for digital innovation and business agility? Watch the Solita Talks event recording to hear how Posti, the main Finnish postal service, and Volvo Car Corporation, the world leading car manufacturer, have moved to Microsoft Azure cloud and focused on data to change their business and stay ahead in highly competitive markets.

Watch recording

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