Microsoft is an established standard in IT and one of the biggest players among cloud service providers, supporting companies in a wide range of tasks with a globally networked platform. These include the healthcare, financial services, government, retail, manufacturing and many other sectors. Already 90% of the 500 largest companies worldwide rely on Microsoft.

When IT and OT work together, the choice often falls on Microsoft Azure to integrate seamlessly into the IT landscape. Azure is a platform that not only provides computing power and storage in the cloud. The offering ranges from IaaS to PaaS and SaaS.

Microsoft offers optional services in the following and other areas such as

• The IoT Hub provides the interface between Azure and IoT devices. This enables management and bidirectional communication.
• IoT Central already includes more than 3 services that can be used to quickly create industry-specific IoT applications with the help of templates.
• Azure Stream Analytics, Synapse Analytics and Machine Learning cover the area of data analysis well.
• Database systems such as SQL, MySQL, CosmoDB or MariaDB enable the storage of large amounts of data in a distributed infrastructure and read/write access in the millisecond range.
• Professional data visualization can be implemented via PowerBI or Kibana.
• The hybrid approach makes it possible to move applications between the edge and the cloud as required.
• As an infrastructure service, Windows Server and SQL Server can be moved to the cloud at low cost.
• The Azure Kubernetes environment makes it easy to create, manage and deploy container-based applications in a scalable manner. Container applications can then be used and clustered on different platforms.

Microsoft invests heavily in cybersecurity and employs thousands of specialists to secure the system.

With data centers in Germany and Europe, Azure is subject to European and German data protection and data security standards (GDPR).

Availability is guaranteed via SLAs.