Azure

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform — the infrastructure, platform, and software services that let organizations run workloads in Microsoft's global data centers rather than on-premises hardware.

For Microsoft-first organizations, Azure is the natural cloud extension. It integrates directly with Entra ID, Active Directory, Microsoft 365, and Intune. Running Windows Server workloads, SQL Server, or .NET applications in Azure benefits from native licensing integrations — Azure Hybrid Benefit, for example, lets you apply existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to reduce cloud costs.

The services that come up most often in enterprise infrastructure work: Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS compute), Azure Virtual Network (private networking), Azure Storage, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure Backup. For identity, Entra ID is Azure's identity layer and is already included in every Microsoft 365 subscription.

Migration path: organizations moving on-premises workloads to Azure typically start with lift-and-shift — replicate the workload as-is, validate it runs, then optimize. Over time, purpose-built PaaS services reduce infrastructure management overhead compared to maintaining VMs.