With the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics, the successful modern enterprise is now dependent on its ability to track and react to transactions and other events on the information network. The amount of data flowing through an enterprise’s network can be overwhelming if not enough computational power is applied. For many organizations, the only economical solution is to rely on the computational power of cloud services.

This is where Microsoft’s Azure Event Grid service comes into play. Announced in an August 2017 blog post, the Event Grid is a fully managed event-routing service that can handle an event emanating from any source on the network and direct it to any destination. For many enterprise transactions, this is all an application needs to do—automation extended to its fullest potential.

SEE: Microsoft Azure: What IT and business leaders need to know (TechRepublic PDF)

Event handling

The key features of Azure Event Grid are its serverless operation and scalability. Any event taking place in the network, even if it is not an Azure services event, can trigger a corresponding serverless and fully automated response of your choosing. One simple example: A file loaded onto a specific server could be an event trigger that sends an email to the people in the enterprise who need to know immediately that that file is there.

The computational and throughput capabilities of cloud services allow Azure Event Grid to scale up and scale down depending on the number of tracked events taking place at any point in time. This scalability ensures that events and their corresponding responses will be reliable and timely.

Tracking and reacting to events with automated responses that change those events into actionable information is a vitally important activity—one that many enterprises are just now realizing will be key to their overall success. Processing all of the data generated by a modern enterprise can’t be accomplished by human analysis alone. Some form of event-driven automation is required or important data will be lost as mere background noise.

In 2017, Azure Event Grid is available for preview and is priced accordingly. The first 100,000 transactions per month are free, with each million transactions per month after that costing $.30. For example, 5 million events tracked in a month would cost $2.97, which is essentially pocket change. Certainly not enough to prevent your enterprise from testing the potential of this cloud service.

SEE: Research: How big data is driving business insights in 2017 (Tech Pro Research)

Bottom line

Microsoft Azure continues to add features to its suite of cloud services and Azure Event Grid adds event handling to the mix, which is an increasingly important application for business enterprises to master. Without some form of automated event handling, enterprises could end up ignoring potentially important data.

The amount of transactions, measurements, and events taking place at all levels of the modern enterprise because of IoT can quickly overwhelm conventional information networks. Successfully managing and leveraging all of that data requires enterprises to change and adapt their thinking. Applications designed to react to events in the information network must be automated and intelligent. The best way to accomplish that mission is through cloud services and cloud computational power.

Azure Event Grid is Microsoft’s answer to the event-tracking problem. By simplifying the development of event-handling applications, the Event Grid can give enterprises the flexibility and the scalability to create just what they need using Azure’s already established set of cloud services. It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to offer Event Grid, as it fills a necessity that many enterprises don’t even know they have yet.

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Your thoughts

Is your enterprise using any automated event handling? Are you concerned that you might be losing some valuable insight into your operations? Share your thoughts and opinions with your peers at TechRepublic in the discussion thread below.