Windows Azure

Windows Azure™ is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Use Windows Azure to:

• Run commodity processes in the cloud
• Build, modify, and distribute scalable applications with minimal on-premises resources
• Perform large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations
• Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively

Windows Azure Benefits

• Bring your ideas to market faster and pay as you go
• Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources
• Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
• Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs
• Choose an on-premises or off-premises deployment model that best suits your needs.
• Scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs.
• Consume computing resources ONLY when the needs arise.
• Focus less energy on managing operational resources and constraints.
• Remove the need to manage hardware
• Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications
• Consistent development and management experience across on-premises and the cloud.