How Developers Can Drive Innovation with Azure

Innovation is key to driving successful business outcomes and helping your customers in new and exciting ways. There is no doubt that a lot of this innovation moving forward will be digital. The fact is, if you want to make a difference in the world, it may well take the form of new software and applications that you build. This puts the power in everyone’s hands to drive innovation and growth. 

Whether you want to build the world’s next innovative app or transform and modernise your existing application, Azure has a lot to offer. With the power of Microsoft Azure and platforms such as Visual Studio, GitHub and Power Apps, your business can deliver innovative capabilities faster and continually create. 

At XAM we work hard everyday to help our customers innovate with Azure.

How Developers Are Using Azure 

With Azure, developers and technical teams are able to make all kinds of things possible and drive innovation anywhere. You only have to browse through Microsoft’s many case studies to see the breadth of possibility that is out there. Some interesting and diverse examples include:

• Space exploration – the International Space Station team has used Azure to expand the capabilities of edge computing. In space, there is limited bandwidth, so data needs to be processed before it is transmitted. Using the power of Azure and the public cloud, Spaceborne Computer-2 enables the team to process data at scale. Processing at the edge and then passing data down to the cloud will become ever more important as space exploration develops further. 
• Cashless transactions – HSBC, one of the world’s largest international banks, developed the PayMe app to combine the convenience of smartphones with cloud services. The team built the app natively on Azure to deliver a great customer experience that is fast and highly secure. It is now used by millions of people to exchange money and businesses can use built-in app intelligence to improve both sales and operations. 
• Gaming – video games are without doubt one of the most demanding, elastic-scale and high-performance applications in the world. Minecraft has over a hundred million active users on Azure. However, it’s not all solely about entertainment; the power of Azure has helped bring ideas to market faster and create global connections for players. 

What’s exciting about each of these areas is that the teams in question have developed solutions using open-source software. People down on earth in their own businesses and industries can use the same software, access the project repositories on GitHub and use the same tools. 

Your Opportunity to Drive Impact

Developers and technical teams are driving massive impact in the world and everyone’s opportunity to do so continues to increase. So many of us are looked to by teams and executives to decide how to achieve organisational goals through technology. Thankfully, there is no end of choice. Azure can help you to drive business impact in many ways:

• Future proof existing apps
• Build innovative apps with new and relevant technology
• Take advantage of unlimited data and analytics
• Build Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning into your solution
• Code and collaborate productively with both local and global teams
• Run applications anywhere

Microsoft’s goal is to help developers to drive business impact. After all, it’s a company that was built by developers for developers, and Azure is a platform for platform creators. The aim is to give you a range of best-in-class tools and services that help you to address the real needs of your customers. More than that, with Azure, you can build any app in any language using any framework and any cloud. The goal is to help you build apps securely, run them anywhere and then add further value with data analytics and insights. 

How Azure Supports Innovation

Azure can help you to drive innovation forward by supporting you to modernise existing apps and develop new intelligent cloud-native apps. Whatever you need to do, there is an entire gamut of tools designed to increase velocity while enabling you to build on your terms. 

To help you to build cloud-native apps and modernise existing apps in innovative  and resilient ways, Azure delivers an end-to-end development platform with featured solutions. This means that you can focus on building great experiences instead of worrying about managing complex infrastructures. Some of the secure cloud solutions and best-in-class tools developers leverage with Azure include: 

• Hybrid cloud platform – you can simplify complex and distributed environments across on-premises, multiple clouds and the edge. What’s more, with Azure management across the entire IT infrastructure, you can run Azure services anywhere.
• Cloud-native applications – you can choose from a range of execution environments, fully managed services and a comprehensive set of app development tools to easily deploy containerised apps.
• Azure security centre –  you can isolate the impact of faults, security incidents and upgrades using microservices, containers and serverless functions to build secure applications in Azure. 
• Visual Studio Code – this powerful code editor helps you to edit, debug and deploy to Azure and it works with any language and runs on any operating system.
• Visual Studio – this integrated development environment can help you to efficiently develop scalable, secure apps, deliver software faster and automate code-to-cloud workflows with developer best practices and tools.

And that’s not where it ends. With Azure, you can stay current and share ideas with a huge global developer community. Whether you want to learn what’s new, build your skills or participate in the community, there is something there for you. Whatever you choose, you can be sure of the ability to grow, learn and be inspired to push forward with your next innovation. 

What Will You Build? 

There is no end to what you can create with Azure, which gives you carte blanche when it comes to innovation. The platform offers modern tools and is open and flexible for any developer building any app, on any device for any platform. With the ability to run existing and new applications anywhere and easily infuse advanced technologies and analytics, the sky’s the limit.