Business-critical applications
Scale mission-critical applications on Azure without compromising performance. Protect your most valuable data with compliance and security certifications.
Trust Azure for your mission-critical applications and data
Run SAP, high-performance computing applications, and the solutions you build on Azure to optimize capital expenditures and manage unpredictable events. Modernize your business-critical systems with AI and analytics to empower a geographically distributed workforce and be future-ready. Increase the efficiency of your IT organization with Azure managed databases by surfacing performance insights through embedded intelligence, scaling without limits, and managing security threats.
Tailor your cloud infrastructure to host your business-critical applications or let Azure do it for you with managed services. Run your workloads on Linux and Windows, tapping into an open platform with a vibrant ecosystem. Choose from over 700 virtual machine sizes and underlying CPU and GPU technologies in addition to highly durable storage solutions. Take advantage of a global network to reach your customers, on-premises users, and IT resources. Select single tenant physical servers dedicated to your organization or rely on purpose-built infrastructure for specialized workloads.
Application services
Adopt built-in and cost-effective cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions to prevent business interruptions. Protect your mission-critical, core applications from single VM, datacenter, and entire-region failures depending on the SLAs your business needs. Rely on our AI-infused cloud platform to help you optimize service operations. Access compute capacity with SLA guarantees, ahead of actual VM deployments, with on-demand capacity reservations.
Data services
Protect your business-critical applications from evolving threats with unified and multi-layered Azure security capabilities and a universal identity platform. Adopt a Zero Trust architecture ideal for securing modern environments. Build your next-generation security operations with the cloud and AI. You own and control your data, encrypted at rest, in transit, and in use. With over 90 compliance certifications, Azure is trusted by enterprises, governments, and startups.
Machine learning
Scale globally while maintaining a local presence in 60+ Azure regions. Create thousands of virtual machines in minutes with Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Optimize the performance of multi-tier applications with proximity placement groups. Take advantage of sub-millisecond latency disk storage for your mission-critical workloads. Tackle the toughest HPC challenges with 200 Gbps InfiniBand. Deploy SAP HANA on specialized infrastructure with up to 480 CPUs and 24 TB of memory.
Running your business-critical applications in Azure can pay off. Avoid sunk costs and increase your operational agility by scaling your IT footprint up or down depending on the business climate. Use Azure reservations, prepaid software plans for Linux and Azure Spot Virtual Machines to lower your operating costs. Use existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Azure Hybrid Benefit. Continuously optimize your cloud spend with Azure Advisor and Azure Cost Management.
Learn more about products and services for the business-critical applications solution
Azure Virtual Machines
Create Linux and Windows virtual machines in seconds and reduce costs.
Azure Disk Storage
Get the durability, scalability, availability, and security you need for all of your data.
Azure Networking
Connect cloud and on-premises infrastructure and services to improve customer and user experience.
Azure SQL
The family of SQL cloud databases providing flexible options for application migration, modernization, and development.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications.
Azure Security Center
Gain unmatched hybrid security management and threat protection.
Azure Sentinel
Make your threat detection and response smarter and faster with AI.
Management and governance
Manage and secure your hybrid cloud resources with tools built into Azure.
Learn more through example solution architectures
Discover how IT organizations like yours are running business-critical applications on Azure.
SAP NetWeaver on SQL Server
This NetWeaver on SQL Server application solution illustrates how a user request flows through an SAP landscape built on NetWeaver using Azure Virtual Machines to host SAP applications and a SQL Server database.
Windows N-tier application on Azure with SQL Server
This reference architecture shows how to deploy virtual machines (VMs) and a virtual network configured for an N-tier application, using SQL Server on Windows for the data tier.
SAP S/4HANA VM on Linux
SAP BW/4HANA is an enterprise data warehouse solution designed for the cloud and optimized for the SAP HANA platform.
Run N-tier application in multiple Azure regions for high availability
This reference architecture shows a set of proven practices for running an N-tier application in multiple Azure regions, in order to achieve availability and a robust disaster recovery infrastructure.
Reference architecture for Oracle Database on Azure
This solution architecture illustrates a canonical architecture to achieve high availability for your Oracle Database Enterprise Edition in Azure.
Get the latest news and resources for business-critical applications on Azure
Organizations of all sizes are running their businesses on Azure
Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA)
SAP HANA runs on an Azure S576m CPU, a server optimized for mission-critical transactional workloads, including SAP S/4HANA in OLTP scenarios. Twelve CPUs are used for a total of 288 cores with 12 TB of memory and 28 TB of storage.
Manulife
The company’s cloud journey involved migrating some of its business-critical applications to Azure and unlocking capabilities that weren’t possible with on-premises deployments.
Schneider Electric
"Where we want to invest our money, it's going to be with a partner like Microsoft who understands our business, understands mission-critical and life-critical workloads, and gives us the confidence that they'll be there throughout the entire journey."
Dale Hall, Cofounder and Executive Vice President, ThoughtWire
The Ottawa Hospital | L’Hôpital d’Ottawa
"We were able to save almost 50 percent by hosting our disaster recovery environment for Epic and other critical systems in Azure"
Daniel Breton, Infrastructure Manager, The Ottawa Hospital
Adaptive Biotechnologies
"We use Azure cloud computing resources and machine learning capabilities to power our immune medicine platform, so we can rapidly map the adaptive immune system to the many different diseases it recognizes. Armed with this map, we can develop novel diagnostics for diseases, including COVID-19, and fuel the next generation of diagnostics."
Mark Adams, Chief Technical Officer, Adaptive Biotechnologies
JetBlue
"We are using Azure today to run a large number of mission-critical applications. These include many customer-facing aspects of the jetblue.com web experience, loyalty management, and identity and access management systems that all run on Azure. Behind the scenes, having our data lakes on Azure has also allowed us to efficiently run predictive analytics models to improve the performance of the business and the overall customer experience."
Ramki Ramaswamy, Vice President IT Technology and Integration, JetBlue
Microsoft partners help support your mission-critical applications
"The construction industry relies on Viewpoint to build and host the mission-critical technology used to run their businesses, so we have the highest possible standards when it comes to the solutions we provide. Working with Microsoft has allowed us to meet those standards in the Azure cloud by increasing scalability, flexibility and reliability—all of which enable our customers to accelerate their own digital transformations and run their businesses with greater confidence."
—Dan Farner, Senior Vice President of Product Development, Viewpoint (a Trimble Company)
"Business-critical applications require a transformational data architecture built on scale-out data and microservices to enable dramatically improved operations, developer productivity, and time to market. With Azure and DataStax, enterprises can now run mission-critical workloads with zero downtime at global scale to achieve business agility, compliance, data sovereignty, and data governance."
—Ed Anuff, Chief Product Officer, DataStax
"As Microsoft's 2020 Data Analytics Partner of Year, Informatica works hand-in-hand with Azure to solve mission-critical challenges for our joint customers around the world and across every sector. The combination of Azure's scale, resilience, and flexibility, along with Informatica's industry-leading Cloud-Native Data Management platform on Azure, provides customers with a platform they can trust with their most complex, sensitive, and valuable business critical workloads."
—Rik Tamm-Daniels, Vice President of Strategic Ecosystems and Technology, Informatica
"SAS and Microsoft share a vision of helping organizations make better decisions as they strive to serve customers, manage risks, and improve operations. Organizations are moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace. Customers realize analytics and cloud are critical to drive their digital growth strategies. This partnership helps them quickly move to Microsoft Azure, so they can build, deploy, and manage analytic workloads in a reliable, high-performant and cost-effective manner."
—Oliver Schabenberger, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer, SAS
"Microsoft is our Foundation partner and selecting Microsoft Azure as our platform to host and deliver Metallic was an easy decision. This decision sparks customer confidence due to Azure's performance, scale, reliability, and security and offers unique best practice guidance for customers and partners. Our customers rely on Microsoft and Azure-centric Commvault solutions every day to manage, migrate, and protect critical applications and the data required to support their digital transformation strategies."
—Randy De Meno, Vice President/Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Practice & Solutions
"Enterprises depend on Rubrik and Azure to protect mission-critical applications in SAP, Oracle, SQL, and VMware environments. Rubrik helps enterprises move to Azure securely, faster, and with a low TCO using Rubrik's automated tiering to Azure Archive Storage. Security-minded customers appreciate that with Rubrik and Microsoft, business-critical data is immutable, preventing ransomware threats from accessing backups, so businesses can quickly search and restore their information on-premises and in Azure."
—Arvind Nithrakashyap, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Rubrik
"Veeam continues to see increased adoption of Microsoft Azure for business-critical applications and data across our 375,000 plus global customers. While migration of applications and data remains the primary barrier to the public cloud, we are committed to helping eliminate these challenges through a unified Cloud Data Management platform that delivers simplicity, flexibility, and reliability at its core, while providing unrivaled data portability for greater cost controls and savings. Our customers are able to take control of their data by easily migrating workloads to Azure, and then continue protecting and managing them in the cloud."
—Danny Allan, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President for Product Strategy, Veeam
"Thousands of customers rely on Veritas to protect their data both on-premises and in Azure. Our partnership with Microsoft helps us drive the data protection solutions that our enterprise customers rely on to keep their business-critical applications optimized and immediately available."
—Phil Brace, Chief Revenue Officer, Veritas
"Because of Zerto's long-standing collaboration with Microsoft, Zerto's platform is fully integrated with Azure and provides a robust, fully orchestrated solution that reduces data loss to seconds and downtime to minutes. Utilizing Zerto's end-to-end, converged backup, DR, and cloud mobility platform, customers have proven time and time again they can protect mission-critical applications during planned or unplanned disruptions that include ransomware, hardware failure, and numerous other scenarios using the Azure cloud—the best cloud platform for IT resilience in the hybrid cloud environment."
—Gil Levonai, CMO and SVP of Product, Zerto
"The longer business continues to be disrupted, the more the lines blur and business-critical functions begin to shift to mission-critical, making virtual desktops and workstations on Microsoft Azure an attractive option for IT managers supporting remote workforces in any function or industry. Teradici Cloud Access Software offers a flexible and secure solution that supports demanding… workloads on Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack with exceptional performance and fidelity, helping businesses gain efficiency and resilience within their business continuity strategy."
—John McVay, Director of Strategic Alliances, Teradici
"It is imperative for Ansys to support our customers' accelerating needs for on-demand high-performance computing to drive their increasingly complex engineering requirements. Microsoft Azure, with its purpose-built HPC and robust go-to market capabilities, was a natural choice for us, and together we are enabling our joint customers to keep designing innovative products even as they work from home."
—Navin Budhiraja, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud and Platform, Ansys
"Robust and stable business-critical systems are paramount for success. Rescale customers leveraging Azure HPC resources are taking advantage of the scalability, flexibility, and intelligence to improve R&D, accelerate development, and reduce costs not possible with a fixed infrastructure."
—Edward Hsu, Vice President of Product, Rescale
"Customers are transitioning business-critical workloads to Azure and realizing significant cost benefits while modernizing their applications. Our solutions help customers develop cloud strategy, modernize quickly, and optimize cloud environments while minimizing risk and downtime."
—Vivek Bhatnagar, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, UnifyCloud
Discover what your peers are doing
Watch this webinar to learn about the five key factors in migrating mission-critical workloads to the cloud.
Improve the quality of your applications
Leverage the Microsoft Azure well-architected framework to assess and improve the quality of your workloads.