You know the talk out there, everyone is moving to the cloud and people are looking at Azure to get there. But many have concerns with going to the cloud or the unknown things around Azure. That’s why we created this blog series. Today, I want to tell you why I think it’s critical to help your development teams leverage Azure, which will help you as an organization.

First, there are 3 things Azure brings to you as a business and for your teams:

1.  You can learn new things quickly.

You can go into Azure, turn on a few features and work with them to try them out. On the contrary, to learn to work and interact with Hadoop infrastructure, for example, you’d have to take the time to set up a bunch of clusters. If your team is looking to take advantage of something new like containers or NoSQL, they can try these out in Azure without investing in infrastructure.

2.  It’s good prep for when you want to go to the cloud.

Bottom line – it’s different in the cloud. Whether you plan to move to the cloud soon or sometime in the future, you’re going to need to understand how subscriptions and components work and gain knowledge in dealing with interactions and how to work in the cloud.  Your team having a better understanding is key to your ability to successfully and effectively make the move.

3.  Breeding creativity within your IT organization and development teams.

Creativity can lead to new business opportunities and improvements to your business. Giving your team the opportunity to jump in and work with some tools, can give them the ability to come up with some new ideas.

Check out Azure Data Week coming in October 2018.

Managing the $

The risk, as always, is cost. No one wants to spend money. But here are 3 things you can do to help manage your risk and cost:

• Dev Test environments are available inside of Azure. This allows you to automatically set things to shut down. This great feature can help you manage costs.
•  If your company uses MSDN or developer licenses, you can get a free amount of spend in Azure (from $25 – $200 per month).
• Free trials. It’s easy to spin up multiple free trials, so you can test out something and reduce the risk of spend. This is a great opportunity to do a POC for things that have high cost risk, like Azure Data Warehouse or HD Insight clusters. Just be sure to use them effectively as they do expire after a certain point.

Check out the current free offering and services from Microsoft here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/.