Why Azure is the best platform for modernizing finance

Why Azure is the best platform for modernizing finance

Microsoft Azure logo

Organizations seeking to modernize financial functions are likely in the process of evaluating which public cloud is best for hosting their finance workloads. Neal Analytics believes that Microsoft’s Platform-as-a-Service approach to developing on the Azure cloud makes it the best for implementing modern finance solutions. The Platform-as-a-Service approach has allowed Microsoft to build a highly secure environment to host and operate finance applications while enabling easy integration with Azure AI and machine learning capabilities.

Coding for financial documentation

Integration capabilities 

Microsoft’s Platform-as-a-Service strategy means they strive to deliver customers the ability to implement cloud environments with minimal manual setup. As a result, Microsoft has designed its solutions with easy integration in mind.

As a result, organizations seeking to modernize finance can quickly implement services like Azure ML, which they can use to enable solutions like ML-based forecasting. Additionally, the easy integration capabilities mean that organizations already leveraging services like SQL Server, Azure SQL database, Power BI, Azure Data Lake, or even Microsoft Excel can accelerate the time to value of modern finance solutions.

Cloud security with Azure

 

Cloud security 

Cloud security is one of Azure’s top priorities. In fact, Microsoft employs over 3,500 cybersecurity experts globally to help safeguard workloads running on Azure. By providing this secure foundation and straightforward security solutions and controls, organizations can quickly create and enforce security groups to control access to sensitive financial data.

These factors all help make Azure the best platform for the most security-conscious organizations in the world.

Man with book at library

 

Operating workloads 

The capabilities discussed above help make Azure an ideal destination for hosting and running finance applications. However, there are additional benefits that may not be immediately obvious. For example, Azure and Microsoft Partners like Neal Analytics have extensive libraries of forecasting and other Python models to help jump-start ML-based forecasting and other machine learning projects. Additionally, Azure provides a strong portfolio of Cognitive Services, allowing organizations to easily implement AI in their workloads.

Getting started 

Neal Analytics offers a few ways to begin this journey. For corporate finance teams that have an urgent need to modernize everything, Neal offers an integrated modernization engagement that starts with discovery and prioritization with finance team stakeholders and their key reports. We then set a strategy and build an initial roadmap around the top priority modules. Once the roadmap is approved, Neal will execute the plan with a disciplined agile delivery approach.

For CFOs already on their journey and who have some solid foundational components in place, we offer a variety of proven capability modules we can implement and customize for each business’s unique needs.

Finally, we offer a simple assessment engagement with clear deliverables and outcomes for customers who want us to assess their capabilities and propose a path forward but may not want to commit to transformation.

Contact us to learn more.

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