Windows Azure 

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that provides developers with the facility to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centres.

Fancy bringing your ideas to market faster and paying as you go? Need to reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources? Want to minimise the effort and costs of IT management – and get rid of the need to manage hardware at all? Well, we’ve got the answer: Windows Azure.

No, our heads aren’t in the clouds – but the future of computing is. From now on you don’t have to worry about your office server running out of space or whether your website will be able to cope with millions of hits from a big campaign. Instead, you can run your computing virtually – which we boffins call ‘cloud computing’. What it means is that we can run commodity processes in the cloud and we can build, modify, and distribute scalable applications with minimal on-premises resources. We can even perform large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, as well as creating, testing, debugging, and distributing Web services quickly and inexpensively.

Applications and services developed by Dot Net can be hosted and managed by Microsoft on the Azure platform. And since Azure is an adaptive platform, it means that the number of servers utilised can be modified on the fly. So you can adapt them to deal with peak load either during certain times of the day or certain times of the year.

But the best thing is that you only ever pay for the processing power you use – eliminating the need for expensive up-front capital investments. This is the beginning of IT as a commodity utility: welcome to the new frontier!

Interested in finding out more?

Book a Windows Azure workshop
Download the White Paper
Download the Factsheet