At their Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last night, Microsoft announced their new in-the-cloud services Operating System – Windows Azure.
This incorporates a number of key Microsoft business systems including Live, .NET, SQL, SharePoint and CRM services. What does this mean for your business ? Well the theory is, you can save on up-front purchasing costs, and simply pay for what you use by buying services in the cloud, running on Microsoft servers. Performance and storage are all scalable, technology-based business solutions now becoming little more than a question of dollars.
While more information is clearly needed, like backups, availability and costs, this is by far the most serious cloud-orientated service rollout of any company we’ve seen to date. For a large part, this makes a lot of sense, especially for small business who are really after a new business function, rather than involving themselves in specialising in IT.
For business, this means they can implement Microsoft technologies, while only paying for what they use. Typically when new services are implemented and user adoption is low, only a small percent of server resources (hardware + software) are utilized, yet business fit 100% of the initial implementation cost up front. With Windows Azure, business pay only for the services they use, this reduces the barrier to entry and getting more people using Microsoft software is always better for their bottom line. A win for business and Microsoft.
Get all the information @ Microsoft.com/Azure