Update
The Windows Azure platform will be available in Australia in April 2010.
Update 2
Microsoft are not announcing Australian pricing today. Which begs the question, what’s the point ? The price is the single critical piece of information that will affect businesses decision to move to Azure or not.
Microsoft has officially launched their Azure platform in Australia. Azure offers Microsoft services in the cloud like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint as well as storage and application hosting to enterprises and startups.
Microsoft say the benefits to businesses that choose to use Windows Azure are:
- 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.
Windows Azure has been available in the US for months now, the important thing about today’s announcement is local, Australian servers. This becomes critical when it comes to speed, with businesses moving multiple gigabytes of data up and down from cloud services.
Watch the conversation on Twitter – #azureau
