No procurement costs (for HW)
The costs for necessary hardware (servers) are precisely zero, as the infrastructure and required services are made available in Azure. What’s more, Visual Studio subscribers have the added advantage of using development and test licenses and hence of cutting their software licensing costs.
Operational costs
You only pay for what you actually use. Billing mostly takes place per minute of deployed resources – apart from fixed IP addresses or the storage space required for virtual machines. This enables high scalability of resources, for instance in stress or load testing, or to include additional servers that are disabled again at the end of the tests. This cuts the costs of ongoing operations.
Scalability and availability
SharePoint infrastructure can be up and running at the drop of a hat. As we have seen, the system allows the configuration of test and even development environments. Horizontal and vertical scaling are possible for productive deployment. Servers with the same configuration can be pooled as resource groups, facilitating horizontal scaling and also ensuring high availability of services configured on the servers themselves.
The process of authenticating your customers and employees with Azure AD is simple and uncomplicated, therefore allowing easy access to the selected SharePoint in Azure contents
Templates
You have the option of using predefined solution templates. A solution template is like a master copy that can be loaded to provide a certain system in Azure.
Equally, you can quickly configure individual SharePoint servers and any other ones you may need – for instance SQL servers and Windows servers (with Active Directory) – yourself or connect the SharePoint server with your local servers. This would produce a possibly hybrid scenario, in which you host the Active Directory (Windows server) or critical company data (SQL server) in a local environment, while outsourcing the host function for SharePoint in Azure.
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Regards,
James