TRANSFORMATION

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.

Windows Azure promo

Use Windows Azure to:

• Run enterprise workloads 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.

Customer Success Stories with Windows Azure

Windows Azure Features

Learn more about Windows Azure on MSDN

Computation

• Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud
• Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
• Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies
• Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage
• Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily
• FastCGI support allows customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP
• .NET Full Trust to allow usage of additional .NET features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
• From Full Trust .NET, developers can call into unmanaged DLLs

Simple Data Storage

• Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation
• Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe
• Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center

Development Tools

• Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services
• Complete command-line SDK tools and samples
• Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.