July 15, 2023
OPA Technologies (OPA) is a cloud-based platform used to manage, coordinate, and communicate transportation and related construction projects key data and core updates among stakeholders. The OPA Roadworks platform is a project-management tool used for municipalities, contractors, and related organizations to prioritize, manage, and communicate updates regarding construction sites and traffic detours. As part of its offering, OPA ensures that its Roadworks platform offers a corporate license with many advantages. To start, the company provides one of the few 100% cloud-based solutions. And even more importantly, when developing OPA’s Roadworks geospatial and Esri-integrated platform V.2.0, the company chose to use Microsoft’s Azure hosting services, as it presented the most advantageous hosting platform available.
Microsoft Azure is a Microsoft cloud-computing service that provides three critical service-based capabilities to Roadworks’ users. These include Microsoft Azure’s software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms. The combination of these services allows OPA to both outsource its infrastructure on Microsoft Azure’s hosting platform and create its own applications and solutions — without needing help from a third-party hosting platform. Instead, each of these services runs through Microsoft’s managed data centers and offers OPA’s software users a tool that helps them better manage and coordinate their projects.
Microsoft Azure offers many advantages, making it OPA’s preferred hosting service. First and foremost, Azure is a high-security offering. The hosting platform was designed using the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), a system that ensures the security and safety of core and private data on the Azure Cloud. Moreover, Microsoft Azure offers over 50 compliances, making its solution among the most competitive in terms of compliance coverage. Microsoft was also the first firm to use ISO 27018, a new international standard for cloud privacy, in its Azure offering. With the Azure Active Directory service, Azure also provides secure Identity and Access Management capabilities, and this in turn allows the right users to access the right information, making this a secure platform.
Other than its superior security offerings, Microsoft Azure also presented itself with many additional advantages, among these its scalability and hybrid capabilities. The Microsoft Azure application offers Roadworks users access on safe, secure and performance-efficient storage devices. This ductility allows the Roadworks software platform to run with millions of users — without it needing any additional coding or having an effect on efficiency. To improve usability and performance, Microsoft Azure also offers a wider range of hybrid connections (e.g., virtual private networks (VPN), content delivery networks (CDN), and even ExpressRoute, a virtual network gateway that helps exchange IP routes between Azure and on-premises networks to route traffic). This diversity of connections allows an easy mobility and consistent communication between different clouds.
“We could not be more pleased, nor have higher confidence in, the capabilities that the Microsoft Azure platform provides to our customer base,” OPA Technologies founder Caroline Arnouk said.
In addition to these services, Microsoft Azure allows an easy integration with other Microsoft tools. This includes products such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint, which are just a few of the growing cloud platform tools from Microsoft. By choosing to use OPA Roadworks with Microsoft Azure, customers reap the benefits of vastly improved efficiencies from the Roadworks-Azure platform integrations.
Another main benefit stemming from the Microsoft Azure platform is its cost efficient platform. The pay-as- you-go model of Microsoft allows Roadworks users to pay for what they use using Microsoft Azure services to create or extend resources. This feature has many tools that help OPA’s user base predict the cost before they purchase it, including predictive calculations such as the total cost of ownership (TCO). As the infrastructure is taken care of by Microsoft Azure, this reduces each Roadworks’ user’s IT administration costs to an absolute minimum. Moreover, Microsoft Azure is said to be five-times less expensive for Windows Server and SQL Server users, compared to its competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS) (according to Spring-people, 2020).
Lastly, Microsoft Azure’s Analytics and Intelligence capabilities are considerably more powerful compared to its competitors. In terms of Roadworks users, this meant that the Microsoft Azure hosting solution is the only cloud-based platform that offers Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), Machine Learning, Bots, and Cognitive APIs capabilities. In addition, many features help the improvement of business processes and decision making such as the SQL and NoSQL data services.
To conclude, many decision-making inputs led OPA Technologies’ leadership team to choose Microsoft Azure’s hosting services over others. This includes the ability of Microsoft Azure to provide OPA’s customers with an all-around complete cloud service that helps users optimize the productivity of their business process and decision-making while ensuring the security of their users’ data. Moreover, Microsoft Azure offers the most efficient services, while making sure that the privacy and the security of any client’s data is a top priority. By choosing Microsoft Azure, OPA Technologies has chosen to provide their clients with fast, efficient, and safe cloud-computing services.