What is Azure?

Is Azure secure?

Yes, security and privacy are built into the Azure platform. Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance, and regulatory compliance with the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings of any cloud service provider.

Is it only for Windows apps and services?

No. Azure supports open source technologies, so you can use the tools and technologies you prefer. Run virtually any application using your data source, with your operating system, on your device.Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Azure products and services

• Compute -- These services enable a user to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs), containers and batch processing, as well as support remote application access.
• Web -- These services support the development and deployment of web applications, and also offer features for search, content delivery, application programming interface management, notification and reporting.
• Data storage -- This category of services provides scalable cloud storage for structured and unstructured data and also supports big data projects, persistent storage (for containers) and archival storage.
• Analytics -- These services provide distributed analytics and storage, as well as features for real-time analytics, big data analytics, data lakes, machine learning, business intelligence (BI), internet of things data streams and data warehousing.
• Networking -- This group includes virtual networks, dedicated connections and gateways, as well as services for traffic management and diagnostics, load balancing, domain name system (DNS) hosting, and network protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
• Media and content delivery network (CDN) -- These services include on-demand streaming, digital rights protection, encoding and media playback and indexing.Hybrid integration -- These are services for server backup, site recovery and connecting private and public clouds.
• Identity and access management (IAM) -- These offerings ensure only authorized users can access Azure services, and help protect encryption keys and other sensitive information in the cloud. Services include support for Azure Active Directory and multifactor authentication (MFA).

A look at the technology behind the Azure cloud

• Internet of things -- These services help users capture, monitor and analyze IoT data from sensors and other devices. Services include notifications, analytics, monitoring and support for coding and execution.
• Development -- These services help application developers share code, test applications and track potential issues. Azure supports a range of application programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, .NET and Node.js. Tools in this category also include support for Visual Studio, software development kits (SDKs) and blockchain.
• Security -- These products provide capabilities to identify and respond to cloud security threats, as well as manage encryption keys and other sensitive assets.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning -- This is a wide range of services that a developer can use to infuse machine learning, AI and cognitive computing capabilities into applications and data sets.
• Containers -- These services help an enterprise create, register, orchestrate and manage huge volumes of containers in the Azure cloud, using common platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Databases -- This category includes Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings for SQL and NoSQL, as well as other database instances, such as Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. It also includes SQL Data Warehouse support, caching, and hybrid database integration and migration features.
• DevOps -- This group provides project and collaboration tools, such as Visual Studio Team Services, that facilitate DevOps software development processes. It also offers features for application diagnostics, DevOps tool integrations, and test labs for build tests and experimentation.
• Migration -- This suite of tools helps an organization estimate workload migration costs, and perform the actual migration of workloads from local data centers to the Azure cloud.
• Mobile -- These products help a developer build cloud applications for mobile devices, providing notification services, support for back-end tasks, tools for building APIs and the ability to couple geospatial (location) context with data.
• Management -- These services provide a range of backup, recovery, compliance, automation, scheduling and monitoring tools that can help a cloud administrator manage an Azure deployment.