Azure

A flexible platform that can integrate with your existing on-premise environment

The Windows Azure platform is a set of cloud computing services that can be used together or independently that enables businesses of all sizes to quickly respond as business needs change. The platform is flexible, can support multiple languages and is able to integrate with an organisation's on-premise environment.

Windows Azure can be used to:

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

Benefits of using Windows Azure include:

Brings your ideas to market faster
Pay as you go
Reduces the effort and costs of IT management
Responding quickly to changes to your business and customer needs
Being able to choose an on-premise or off-premise deployment model that best suits your needs
Ability to scale your IT resources up and down based on your needs
Only consume computing resources when the need arises
Focussing less energy on managing operational resources and constraints
Removes the need to manage hardware
Frees up existing development skills to build cloud applications
Ensures consistent development and management experience across on-premise and the cloud.