Azure FAQs: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

In Q1 and Q2 of 2023, watch for a huge hosting upgrade from VGM Forbin. The hosting upgrade provides improved security, availability and performance. You may have some questions about what Microsoft Azure (Azure) is and how it can benefit your business and website. In this blog post, we will answer some of the most frequently asked questions and discuss the above and beyond benefits.

What is Azure?

Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides a variety of services such as computing power, storage, databases, analytics, storage, networking, and more. Now through VGM Forbin, Azure hosting is now attainable for your business which means huge things for us both.

Why have we teamed up with Azure?

To serve your growing compliance and regulatory needs, VGM Forbin has partnered with one of the most secure hosting platforms in the world. Azure allows us to quickly and easily scale resources up or down to meet ever changing needs. In addition, the ability to use Azure to build, test, and deploy applications in a variety of programming languages, can help us be more agile and efficient in the development process.

What are the benefits for your business?

You can expect an improved site infrastructure and enhanced performance for your website. The use of Azure also can help companies to reduce IT costs while maintaining or even increasing their operational efficiency and security.

Here are a few reasons that you will want this for your business:

• Enhanced Security
  The level of security nearly all Fortune 500 companies and many governments trust. We allow Microsoft’s team of security experts to keep the operating systems up to date for us.
• As Geo-Redundant as it Gets
  Global infrastructure is linked by one of the largest interconnected networks on earth which are called Platform-as-a-service or PaaS. With the PaaS model, Azure takes care of our infrastructure, so we can focus on the website itself.
• Impactless Maintenance
  With data spread and duplicated across servers, site infrastructure updates will be seamless. Azure will shift our infrastructure to what are called Containers and provide several key benefits. Other than all the improved efficiency for our development team, the biggest benefit will be our ability to host each customer in what is called a POD. Each POD will run an individual website and those PODS cannot communicate with one another. This drastically reduces security risks from jumping from one customer to another.
• Extraordinary Data Recovery Capabilities
  When you ask, “can it be retrieved?” The answer will be “Yes!” Azure allows us to host your website in multiple datacenters at once. If one datacenter were to go offline, your site would move over to a 2^nd datacenter within a geographical area automatically. While this is exceedingly rare, in the event an entire geographical region was to go offline, each site will be backed up to a 2^nd geographical region that can be turned on within a few hours.
• The Fastest Hardware
  Faster than ever and more affordable through VGM Forbin’s agreement with Azure. Due to the nature of Azure, we will have the ability to automatically increase each POD’s resources to accommodate additional traffic to the site. This way, your site will perform well, even during high traffic times.

When are the Azure upgrades available?

If you want to make sure you are among the first to be upgraded, contact us today. These upgrades will be available and rolled out throughout Q1 and Q2 of 2023. In the interim, we will continue to provide more detailed information to our customers.