Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform is a cloud platform offering that “provides a wide range of Internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments and the Internet. Windows Azure serves as a run time for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications off-premises. The Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft data centers.

Windows Azure in India

Microsoft made its cloud-based operating system, Windows Azure, commercially available for use in India.

Pricing Structure of Windows Azure

Indian users can access the Windows Azure services at $0.12 per hour while storage on Azure would cost enterprises $0.15 per GB on a monthly basis. Pricing details can be seen here.

“Companies have reported anywhere between 16-49 per cent reduction in their total spend on information technology and related services over a three-year period after migrating to cloud computing.” Says Microsoft.

Windows Azure :

• Compute = $0.12 / hour
• Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
• Storage transactions = $0.01 / 10K
• Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB – ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*

SQL Azure :

• Web Edition:  Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month
• Business Edition:  Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month
• Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB – ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*

Windows Azure Platform App Fabric :

Access Control

• Access Control transactions = $1.99/100K

Service Bus connections

• $3.99 per connection on a “pay-as-you-go” basis
• $9.95 for a pack of 5 connections
• $49.75 for a pack of 25 connections
• $199 for a pack of 100 connections
• $995 for a pack of 500 connections

Data transfers

• Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB – ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*

Privacy is a issue with cloud computing, and in-spite of the encrypted transfers, some users hesitate using Cloud Computing.

Windows Azure seems to be a great cost cutting option, especially for small and midsized enterprises; moreover it could help freelancers as well for developing new applications and software, because in such setups, companies share computer resources (servers, software and data storage, etc.) through the internet, instead of setting up such infrastructure at their own end.