Azure delivers integration, heterogenity, and security: Yousef Khalidi

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Microsoft Azure has been a idea -- from a small team, to a very large scale system, said Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer, Wimdows Azure, Microsoft. He was speaking at the Microsoft Azure 2014 conference.

The industry trends today are mobility, big data, apps and cloud. The cloud OS vision includes: transform the data center, unlock insights from any data, empower people-centtric IT, and enable modern business apps. We are driven by demands of enterprise customers.

Azure delivers integration, heterogenity, and security. Integration is on-premise and cloud. Heterogenity is open, broad and flexible. Security is all about being trustworthy. It is all about trusting with transparency. He said that Microsoft is part of the ISO 27001 cloud security alliance (STAR). We have unparalleled experience in online security.

For those using or considering using Windows Azure, they need to ask - how can my IT infrastructure keep up with my business?

There are infrastructure services like virtual machines, virtual network, VPN, traffic manager, and CDN. There are data services like SQL database, HDInsight, Table and Blob storage. There app services as well, such as cloud services, caching, identity, service bus, media, mobile services, web sites, BizTalk services, HPC and analytics. Azure datacenters your datacenters.

"We have been investing in data centers for several years. We have also have extensive global support centers. We have local account teams," he added.

Azure architectural principles (from 2006) were virtualized compute fabric - using HyperV based virtualization, virtualized network- with logical networks over physical network, scale-out compute model - with uniform nodes, VM as unit of capacity, and optimized for MTTR, each node is a cache - the state must be externalized, now to durable network drives, and local drives used as a cache; automation - such as apps, OS and hardware lifecycle management, now to model driven automation; and rich services - distributed systems are hard to get right.

Today, the compute instances have grown from 10s of PB in 2010 to exabytes in 2014. Winodws Azure momentum is increasing - 54 percent Fortune 500 companies sighed up for Azure, we have over 100 new customers a day, we are seeing 2X compute and storage every six months.

Varun Sood, CIO, Fortis Healthcare, who was invited to the stage, as an Azure user, added: "We have about 63+ facilities in India. Last June, we signed up with Microsoft for Azure. Every hospital is a business lifecycle. The challenges we faced were the ability to respond faster to business needs. We also saw that lot of people came in for check ups on weekends. Our core is healthcare. Another one was how to optimize costs, thereby freeing capital - which can be added to expand business.

"We stopped thinking as IT. We set out some parameters from business perspective. We took a decision to move to a cloud-only platform. So, we went for Azure. We were looking at a deeper relationship and for someone who understands how enterprises operate. We achieved two or three things. One, we started responding much faster. Second, it is much more cost effective. Moving to Azure has helped improve our availability. From the IT standpoint, we have a freer mindshare. Its eased our life to some extent."

Khalidi concluded by adding that Windows Azure allows you to move faster, save money, and be flexible and consistent.