Azure services

Wikipedia describes Microsoft Azure as “a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner hosted datacenters.” This is a pretty good general description of what Azure provides to you.

Here’s Microsoft’s description of Azure: “a growing collection of integrated cloud services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web—for moving faster, achieving more, and saving money.”

Azure allows you to do the following:
 Use the skillsets you already possess and the technologies with which you already are familiar to develop and deploy solutions using SQL Server.

 Work with a wide range of operating systems, programming languages, databases, and devices.

 Integrate Azure with your existing IT environment, including Active Directory for single sign-on.

 Scale up and scale down your Azure services based on demand so you only pay for what you need when you need it.

 Maintain data privacy. Microsoft with Azure services was the first major cloud provider to adopt the new international cloud privacy standard, ISO 27018.

 Encrypt your SQL Server data both at rest and on the wire.

 Have enterprise-grade service-level agreements (SLAs) on services, 24/7 tech support, and round-the-clock service health monitoring.

Finally, you might be asking: Why Microsoft? A good answer is that Microsoft is the only vendor positioned as a Leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Application Platform as a Service, and Cloud Storage Services for the second consecutive year. Another answer is that Microsoft is the only vendor to offer SQL Server as a service and SQL Server in IaaS. A final answer is that Microsoft is extending the capabilities of SQL Server in Azure at a faster pace than any other vendor.

Source of Information : Migrating SQL Server Databases to Azure