If you want to use OpenAI's models in an enterprise environment, the Azure OpenAI Service is exactly for that. The same GPT-4 model, but with Azure's enterprise security and compliance agreements.
01. The Difference from Standard OpenAI
The advantages of Azure OpenAI compared to public OpenAI:
- A contractual guarantee that data won't be used for model training
- Enterprise agreements (DPA, HIPAA, etc.)
- Regional data residency (EU Data Boundary)
- Azure IAM, VNet integration
02. Available Models
GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, o1, DALL-E, Whisper (speech-to-text), text-embedding-ada. There can be a few months' delay between a new model's release and its arrival on Azure.
03. RAG Architectures
An enterprise RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system is built with the combination of Azure OpenAI + Azure AI Search + Azure Blob Storage. You make your company documents talk with GPT-4.
04. Fine-tuning
It's possible to train the model specifically for your company. But in most scenarios it isn't necessary; with good prompts + good RAG, fine-tuning isn't needed.
05. Data Protection and Turkey
Azure OpenAI can be deployed in the EU region. From a data-protection standpoint, a DPA is signed and data is processed in the EU. A separate evaluation for sectors with a data-residency requirement in Turkey.