1.1 Demystifying Microsoft Azure

What Exactly is Microsoft Azure?

Welcome to the beginning of your journey into understanding Azure. As this is the first lesson we must explore the core concept that is cloud computing. 90% of organizations have adopted a hybrid cloud setup and it’s expected to reach 100% adoption of cloud in some form or another by 2027. Cloud computing is…inevitable. Needless to say, cloud computing is quickly becoming mandatory knowledge for cybersecurity professionals.

In the not so distant past if a business wanted to run a website, build an application, or store data they had to buy physical computer servers. They had to put those servers in a dedicated room, pay for the electricity to run them, invest in heavy duty air conditioning to keep them cool, and potentially hire an entire IT team to maintain the hardware. This is called an on-premises setup. Gross...

Microsoft Azure is the modern alternative. It is a massive global network of highly secure physical datacenters owned and operated by Microsoft.

With cloud computing readily available now instead of buying your own hardware, you rent computing power, storage, and networking over the internet. As in, you pay for how much of Microsoft’s infrastructure you use.

Think of Azure like a utility company but for ‘puter power. You certainly don't build your own power plant, I suppose you could if you knew mechanical and electric engineering and live off grid. On a farm. Grow your own food. Ahh…doesn’t that sound relaxing. Anyways, to get electricity to your house you just flip a switch and pay the electric company for the exact amount of kilowatts you used that month. Azure works the exact same way, but for computing power. They measure how much you use and bill you monthly. Keep in mind in any future labs, projects, or if you’re just messing around in Azure, that spinning up resources like a Virtual Machine can very quickly rack up costs and there can be unforeseen resources that the virtual machine depends on that also generates costs. Luckily, there’s easy to configure budget alerts/monitoring, which I highly advise looking into if you explore spinning up your own personal Azure environment.

Why is Azure Needed?

The traditional on-premises model has a massive flaw: guessing capacity.

If a company buys 10 physical servers expecting normal web traffic, but suddenly goes viral, those servers will overload, and the website will crash. Not a good look for a business. To fix this, the company has to order more servers, wait weeks for them to ship, and then install them manually which can add more weeks of potential downtime. Conversely, if they buy 50 servers "just in case" and never use them, they have wasted tens of thousands of dollars on idle hardware. Hardware they’re not using and if you know how quickly technology improves, that hardware unfortunately will become obsolete fairly quickly. So the servers have to be upgraded at some point in the future. 

Azure is needed, more like it came out of necessity, because it eliminates this guesswork. It provides on-demand resources. If your business needs 100 servers for a massive black friday sale, you can spin them up in Azure with just a few clicks. The second the sale is over, you can delete them and stop paying for them instantly. Again, make sure you delete everything that got spun up…

How Azure Helps Businesses

Azure transforms how companies operate by offering several distinct advantages over traditional on-premise setup and management:

• Cost-Efficiency (The Shift to OpEx): Businesses no longer have to make massive upfront Capital Expenditures (CapEx) to buy hardware and Azure uses an Operational Expenditure (OpEx) model. You pay only for what you consume, often billed down to the minute or second. This is an easy sell to businesses.
• Instant Scalability: Azure allows businesses to scale up (adding more memory/CPU to an existing server) or scale out (adding more servers to handle a load) instantly to meet fluctuating customer demand. Not to mention RAM prices are getting ridiculous…
• Global Reach & Speed: Azure operates in over 60 geographical regions around the world. Not surprising since it’s Microsoft after all. A business in New York can deploy an application to an Azure datacenter in London with a single click. Don’t even have to hire someone in the UK or fly someone over. This ensures their European customers experience zero lag (latency). If you’re a gamer, you may know the pain that even a small amount of lag can cause. And by pain I mean immeasurable rage. Businesses certainly don’t want angry customers.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Most businesses cannot afford a dedicated, 24/7 physical and digital security team. By moving to Azure, small and large businesses can take advantage of Microsoft's multi-billion dollar security infrastructure. That includes automatic backups, threat detection, and disaster recovery failovers.

What Azure Actually Accomplishes

Microsoft Azure encompasses over 200 products and services across their global network of datacenters. Azure satisfies the needs of any given business through three primary "Service Models". These are concepts (buzzwords) you need to know as a cybersecurity operative and will encounter at some point in your lifetime working in tech.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The most basic building block. You're renting raw virtual hardware. Virtual Machines, hard drives, virtual networks, etc. Microsoft manages the physical building housing the physical servers and hardware, but YOU are responsible for installing the operating system, patching it, and securing your software. A blank slate if you will.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Say you want to build a web app, but you don't want to deal with Windows or Linux updates. Here's a middle ground for you. Microsoft handles the physical hardware and the underlying operating system. While you just upload your application code and let it run.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS): The complete package. The software is fully built, hosted, and managed by a vendor, and you simply access it via a web browser (e.g., Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce).

Microsoft Azure is not a single tool, it's a massive ecosystem. It’s the invisible backbone that allows modern businesses to build, test, deploy, and manage EVERYTHING they need on a global scale that is as secure as it gets. All without ever touching a single piece of physical hardware.