Executive Summary

Contributing analysts: Michael Cherry, Rob Helm, Wes Miller, Don Retallack, Andrew Snodgrass, Joshua Trupin

Azure, Microsoft’s hosted application and storage services offering, has evolved substantially since it became commercially available in Feb. 2010. It consists of dozens of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) components. Customers can leverage Azure’s massive scale and geographic reach for solutions in diverse areas, including virtual machine and Web site hosting, mobile application services, relational and nonrelational storage, and disaster recovery. Azure supports many non-Microsoft technologies, including Linux, Android, iOS, and Java.

Recent Azure additions and enhancements show trends in areas where organizations could find opportunities to build new solutions or improve existing ones. Microsoft has largely driven the evolution by building on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure and by expanding and advancing Azure’s PaaS portfolio. It also has substantially updated the management technology and options for on-premises deployment of Azure infrastructure and solutions. The improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment experiences, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should continue to be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes.