Application Integration and Business-to-Business Commerce

Azure can act as an intermediary between applications, including applications deployed on-premises or elsewhere outside of Azure. This model can reduce the complexities of maintaining Internet-facing network infrastructure, simplify firewall configurations, and improve reliability through asynchronous inter-application communication. The Azure Service Bus provides basic application-to-application connectivity, while Azure BizTalk Services offers message processing and transformation like Microsoft’s BizTalk Server software.

Service Bus

Service Bus provides services to connect applications across the Internet. It relays application communication across organizational boundaries, potentially reducing risky firewall configuration requirements. Service Bus can help connect customer- and partner-facing applications, such as extranets, to on-premises systems and could also benefit applications on external hosting platforms such as Azure.

Service Bus is often used to connect applications deployed on Azure to other applications hosted on-premises. For example, an Azure—based e-commerce Web site could send order notifications to the on-premises systems of product warehouses without requiring those warehouses to reconfigure their firewalls with new access points that could lead to vulnerabilities. Service Bus could also be used independently of other Azure services, such as in a solution that connects an on-premises application to an application hosted in Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform by routing communications through Service Bus.