Windows Azure Success Secret

Windows Azure is considered innovative, simply reliable and powerful platform. The most important benefits of using it include: reduced cost, scalability, flexibility and efficiency. As you may notice, recently many enterprises, service providers, small businesses, and governments who is deeply interested in running their business challenges in efficient and effective manners, are looking for cloud solutions. So, we found interesting to find out what makes it so successful.

The answer for many companies is in the cloud. The Windows Azure Platform offers an increasingly new approach for which makes it trendy and successfully one for running the business. First of all let’s compare a little bit models of cloud computing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with PaaS (Platform as a Service). The first one is considered to be the traditional one producing on-premises custom applications. The problem is that such apps require additional spending: upfront costs to purchase hardware and acquire software licenses (database software, workflow, user management, etc.) as they all running on the location or on the server of the company. Windows Azure Cloud Computing is recognized as PaaS platform, it means that all tools to produce applications already exist and needed only the code for running custom apps. Obviously, it highly simplifies the developer’s works that already have the skills working with Windows environment. One more goal is the Azure’s care of all specialist services as Access Control Service, SQL Azure Database, Service Bus all running online and for free, because of having hosting in the cloud, remote location. It also provides you and your company an anytime and anywhere access. As a result, Windows Azure Platform with its services provides the best environment for creative and moneymaking challenges and decisions.

Make my words sound solid, I’ve asked the question to LinkedIn professionals about the growth of Windows Azures’ popularity and also I referred to some comments of enterprises’ experience working with cloud computing.

“…Of course it is also about money. If business thinks they can save 10% or 30% or more by moving their products into Azure then surely it makes it attractive option. …..Since there is so much business potential in the cloud I’m pretty sure the demand for azure developers is going to increase. I wouldn’t be surprised to see software companies trying to acquire best azure talent from all over the world. Think about it. If your company has lot of talented azure developers you have pretty good position when competing from project. Any project. Anywhere in the world. Systems from corporations, governments etc. Huge systems”.
Toni Parviainen

“Any business that uses Microsoft’s development technologies and builds/owns/operates enterprise systems needs to quickly get up to speed with Azure. From an empirical perspective, at the Microsoft developer conference in Las Vegas last March, a small minority of all developers present at the conference were currently developing on Azure. So at least in the short term, my view is that the demand for experienced Azure developers is likely exceeding the supply”.
Matt McLoughlin

Every time after working with cloud computing the enterprises tell their success stories of using this new technology which make their businesses more competitive, challenging and help to achieve better business agility. Let’s see what representatives think about their experience.

“Windows Azure enabled us to harness more than a decade of experience in producing, managing, distributing and licensing digital media to build an enterprise-class digital asset management system — in less than 12 months — that can compete with the best and biggest in the digital asset management industry”
David MacLaren, founder and CEO of VRX Studios and now of MediaValet
“With only 11 employees, we run very lean operations and employ agile development methods. By using Windows Azure, we can achieve critical levels of scalability without compromising our efficiency. We have a dynamic infrastructure in place that leaves us well-prepared for our future growth and expansion”.
Vincent Vergonjeanne, Chief Executive Officer at Kobojo

“Development and deployment was very straightforward. We used our existing skills and development tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio development system, to migrate the website to the Windows Azure platform. Plus, we won’t have to change the way we work going forward. We now have a viable cloud-based solution that we can offer to our customers. By using Windows Azure and the Umbraco accelerator, we can meet our customers’ complex content management needs and their desire to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud”
Paul Hernacki, Chief Technology Officer at Definition 6

The reviewed comments, demonstrate new horizons and new opportunities with the help of Windows Azure Cloud Computing for small to midsize businesses. If you have something to add, be sure to leave a comment on this post.