Welcome back to our Back-to-Basics blog series, a glossary for Microsoft 365. In the first installment of this series, we discussed the ultimate question – what is Microsoft 365? And as we established, Microsoft 365 is comprised of many services including features for accounts and security, such as Azure. Today, we will be covering these two questions:
Microsoft describes Azure as “a huge collection of servers and networking hardware, which runs a complex set of distributed applications. These applications orchestrate the configuration and operation of virtualized hardware and software on those servers. The orchestration of these servers is what makes Azure so powerful.
With Azure, users don’t have to maintain and upgrade their hardware as Azure does this behind the scenes.” In essence, Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud offering for individuals and businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications and services
It is important not to mistake Azure for Azure Active Directory (AD) – a key component of Azure, now known as Entra ID – Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service.
The difference is that Azure is Microsoft’s public cloud platform used for building, deploying, and managing cloud applications and services, while Entra ID is an identity and access management service used for things like single sign-on (SSO).
Azure is vast, consisting of over 200 products and cloud services. However, we can boil down the main components of Azure into some broad categories listed below. I’ve included some specific services within each category for your reference, and I will further explain these services in future blogs.
Here are examples of the different Azure services:
And the list goes on…
Ultimately, Azure is a comprehensive cloud platform that provides a wide variety of services across compute, storage, networking, security, databases, AI/ML, analytics, and more.
In the next article, we’ll cover Azure AD (Entra ID) in depth.
