As a Principal Consultant with Pragmatic Works, I have many conversations with customers about moving to Azure. As a Consulting Sales Manager, Jon Reutinger, has these discussions every day. I sat with Jon to ask what he commonly hears from customers about why they are looking at Azure.

People want to move for various reasons. One reason is by implementing an Azure hybrid solution, they don’t have to commit right away to moving their entire environment. Getting part of their environment there is a great way to dip their toes in the water.

Another reason is from an applications standpoint. Some applications lend themselves much better to Azure as opposed to legacy applications that don’t play very well in the cloud. Scalability is another reason. Azure’s subscription model allows businesses to scale up or down. This lends itself well to a variety of industries, particularly in industries with seasonality such as finance and retail.

Check out Azure Data Week coming in October 2018

“How do I get started?” is the opener of many conversations and Azure’s hybrid approach offers a good starting point. We talk to customers about moving their data warehouses into the cloud, or disaster recovery. With disaster recovery in Azure you don’t have to maintain that infrastructure, so you can reduce infrastructure costs, as well as optimize your maintenance around your infrastructure.