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Azure & Chakray

Chakray is a Microsoft partner focused on Azure Integration Services. Our partnership with the company gives us the ability to utilise Azure to solve common IT concerns faced by organisations today. Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to supply our customers with experienced Azure integration professionals in the UK, Spain, Canada, LATAM and APAC regions. We help our clients realise the full potential of their investment in Azure by utilising its integration tools such as Azure API Management and Logic Apps, off-the-shelf connectors, and extensible workflows in a comprehensive manner.

How we help with Azure

For any company, being at the cutting edge of digital integration is a massive organisational capability. That’s why every step of the integration process—no matter how small—must be performed with care. Chakray makes sure that organisations thrive from the get-go; this starts at choosing the right technologies during the planning phases so that a refined integration strategy can be established. Chakray’s own Integration Centre of Excellence (ICoE) or another ICoE may be beneficial in validating technologies, following appropriate methodologies, and undertaking initiatives that help organisations acquire the capability of IT integration.

For some organisations, the technological solution to their integration problems might involve deploying Azure. Using the range of integration services on Azure’s platform, Chakray assists organisations in mapping out their integration journey and strengthening their approach to digital transformation. This can mainly be achieved by remediating legacy systems through the incorporation of technologies such as APIs, connecting an organisation’s platform to external SaaS applications to improve its interactions with customers and partners, and implementing these components in Azure workflows. The end result is the modernisation of business processes.

We provide the following Azure services:

Training

Design

Architecture

Integration Accelerator

Managed Services/ Support

Implementation/ Development

Delivery/ Project Management

Through their everyday business processes, companies handle and generate large volumes of data whose potential can only be unlocked through digital innovation. Azure Integration Services checks that box; with its robust feature set, it smooths operations within enterprises, boosts efficiency, and curtails costs. A variety of businesses benefit from Azure, including companies across industries and verticals such as manufacturing, telco, retail, game development, real estate, etc.

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Why Azure?

Azure’s key benefits are its comparative ease of use and consumption based cost model. Most of Azure’s services follow consumption-based pricing, which means that customers are only expected to pay for what they use, whether that be virtual machines, databases, storage, networking services, or other products. Although the cost for each Azure service is calculated differently, Microsoft is completely transparent about all of its pricing structures. Azure’s pricing strategy, coupled with features such as autoscale that facilitate the addition and removal of resources according to customer specifications, introduces greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness to its solutions. Organisations can opt out of their subscriptions at any time (flexibility) and resize their infrastructure to match fluctuations in business throughout the year (scalability). Ultimately, this improves their IT budget management (cost-effectiveness).

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Azure has many positives

For instance, it acts as a user friendly platform for application developers.

Despite its expansive list of services, the Azure development platform avoids feeling cumbersome; it successfully leverages the value of cloud computing without compromising on the experience of working with its features. In fact, it simplifies the creation, hosting, and maintenance of new and existing applications and their resources, whether it be in the cloud or on-premises. The Azure portal—a centralised console that helps handle applications as well as resources ranging from virtual machines to databases—further streamlines the platform’s powerful suite of development tools by acting as an alternative to using the command line.

Through its graphical user interface, users can do everything from managing their subscription to creating and deploying web applications. Other notable features of Azure include its availability (boasting an uptime rate of 99.95%), security, and speed.

Finally, Azure’s line of integration services also bring their own set of advantages to the table. By connecting internal and external applications through the cloud medium, Azure Integration Services strengthens B2B messaging, communication, and relationships. This is extremely valuable for businesses seeking to enhance their user base, customer relations, corporate tie-ups, and the overall impact of their operations.

Core Products

Here are some of the key product capabilities of Azure Integration Services:

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Azure API Management:

creates a secure environment for launching and monitoring APIs. Its features, which include API gateway, rate limiting, and transform policies, enable internal and external developers to build top-notch APIs and microservices. Using the API Management developer portal, organisations can get better insight into the performance of their APIs, expose them to consumers, and make required adjustments with the help of support resources like their API documentation. Azure API Management integrates smoothly with the other services in this line, such as Azure Logic Apps and Event Grid. Since it supports OpenAPI specifications, developers can record their APIs in a standard, programming language-agnostic documentation that is discernible to humans and computers alike.

Azure Service Bus:

a reliable enterprise messaging solution that bridges the gap between distinct services and applications. The message can consist of text, JSON, or XML data.

Azure Functions:

it is an on-demand serverless computing service that reduces the lines of code that users have to write. Functions also allows users to use virtually any programming language they want to. It significantly reduces the costs and complexities of infrastructure maintenance. This also decreases the practice of hard-coding and increases the reusability and modularity of the programs.

Azure Logic Apps:

the main purpose of this service is to automate workflows and business processes through the deployment of flexible integration solutions. This also facilitates communication between applications, resources, and services hosted on the cloud and on-premises.

Azure Event Grid:

this service follows a publish-subscribe model and moderates events-based communication between applications. Through the Grid, events are routed from the publisher to the subscriber, both of which can be a variety of SaaS applications and Azure services. Users only need to react in case of a change in the system; this makes it easier for them to automate an action in response to the events. This can help construct an event-driven architecture in an organisation that deals with multiple subsystems handling common events and high data volumes that require real-time processing.

Our Approach

Our customers initially interact with us through an Integration Accelerator. This quick, fixed cost, and low friction engagement brings awareness to the value of implementing Azure within organisations. We employ a value-based approach by helping customers select meaningful use cases that demonstrate early return on investment (ROI).

At Chakray, we recognise the need to tailor Azure’s best features and services to meet the unique needs and challenges of an organisation. This will expand the scope of opportunities for the company, both within and beyond its walls. The ability to reuse integration components within Azure, its PAYG model, and trouble-free maintenance are a few of its standout characteristics.

As previously stated, integration is an important organisational capability. In some cases, we deliver integration as a complete end-to-end capability. In others, we help build a company’s own capability or an associated centre of excellence. Our guidance covers a broad scope of integration activities including integration development, API design, deployment of API facades, assembling scrum development teams, deployment of industry-specific solutions, and so on.

Azure Considerations

Compatibility is one of the core considerations to make when deciding to migrate to Azure’s cloud infrastructure. If a company is already utilising services with the Microsoft ecosystem such as Office 365, Azure would be a natural choice for cloud solutions and integrations. Moreover, the users will already have a sense of familiarity as they are accustomed to using the Microsoft interface on multiple other products.

It’s also important to note the areas within the company that produces the most costs. This visibility into the organisation’s expenditure can allow you to analyse the costs that would arise from Azure. In turn, this will effectively influence how the company takes advantage of Azure’s consumption-based pricing model, avoiding the purchase of excessive or incongruous resources and curtailing TCO.

Chakray can guide you through the journey of building an integration capability. With our expertise, it isn’t too hard to employ the right product or capability, building the necessary skills, knowledge sharing, and establishing a strong centre of excellence.

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About Chakray

Chakray was established in 2013 and has since been active in its pursuits as a specialist integration consultancy. Our entire team is dedicated to the discipline of integration. Through our expertise in areas such as enterprise integration patterns, iPaaS, microservices, and event streaming, we bring a holistic integration mindset to the table whilst addressing our customers’ pain points. We make it our mission to help customers avoid the debts that accompany technical implementations by steering them towards the most suitable technologies for their organisation, all while emphasising best practice. We gather the right SMEs and practitioners to regulate integration issues faced by the company—everything from DevOps to more specific areas like GDPR and data protection. Our customers rely on our experience to evade common pitfalls and introduce the right capabilities within their organisation.