The Azure Cloud: Is it ideal for small businesses?

Assessing the cost and benefits of small businesses switching to the cloud.

The cloud can seem like a huge investment, especially when factoring in the migration of data to another platform. But what small businesses are realizing more and more is that working in the cloud and using SaaS online applications is a huge money-saver. Businesses plan to increase usage of SaaS over the coming years rather than decrease, simply because online has become the new way to cut costs.

Small businesses in particular benefit from the significant reduction of administrative and energy costs. Rather than dealing with servers and a development environment that can lag and can have a hindering number of down-times, the Azure Cloud offers over a 99.9% up-time guarantee. Many enterprise businesses cannot even boast such a level of up-time.

Not having to manage server up-time or updates/upgrades saves on the hassle and the wallet. The pricing of Azure is also competitive to contender Amazon EC2 cloud computing.

Windows Azure: