Azure is not just a cloud; it is an intelligent cloud. Now, you might be wondering what an intelligent cloud is. People consume computing power primarily because of two reasons: Either they are searching for something and after finding what they were looking for, act on it. The entire computing powers are associated with these two purposes. Azure provides infrastructure and services to invest millions and billions of records with hyper-scale processing. It provides multi-petabytes of storages for data. It provides a host of inter-connected services that can pass data among each other. With such capabilities in place, data can be processed to generate meaningful knowledge and insights. There are multiple types of insights that can be generated through data analysis:
- Descriptive: This kind of analysis provides details about what is happening or happened in the past
- Predictive: This kind of analysis provides details about what is going to happen in the near-future or the future
- Prescriptive: This kind of analysis provides details about what should be done to either enhance or prevent the current or future happening
- Cognitive: This actually executes the actions determined by prescriptive analytics in an automated manner
While insights are good to them, it is also important to act on them reactively or proactively. Azure provides a rich platform to ingest big data, process and augment data through its rich services, store data in its large data storage systems, conduct analysis on them, generate insights and dashboards, and then execute actions based on it. These services are available to every user of Azure and provide a rich ecosystem to create solutions on top of them. Enterprises are creating applications and services that are completely disrupting industries because of easy availability of these intelligent services from Azure that are easily combined to create meaningful value to end customers. Azure had ensured that services that were commercially unviable to implement by small and medium companies can now readily consume and deploy them in a few minutes.