Recently I attended a seminar hosted by Jeff Brand for Microsoft’s Azure platform – very interesting and powerful tools are being developing for small to midsized businesses. Cloud computing is really developing to the point where even very small businesses can benefit; inexpensive, relatively easy to deploy, scalable and powerful. Microsoft’s cloud computing solutions are good and will be very good within the year as they roll out additional features and remote server sites.
Most of us are concerned about a "cloud" solutions provider failing or lacking the resources to support their platforms. With Microsoft, even with some of its shortcomings, at least you have a strong brand and known quantity. Definitely worth at least testing if not full deployment.
A great first use would be in a promotion of your products or services; perhaps using your website to launch the promotion and assuming you did not want to buy additional server capacity. Another concern if you launched a promotion and your website is hosted by 3rd party; you could find many problems that would negatively affect a customer's experience with their server experiencing overload issues. Also fees and surcharges with 3rd parties may pile up at many hosted services when volumes go beyond your base contracted rates or they may even downgrade your web service needs.
Unless you are a developer familiar with Azure it would be best to hire someone with previous experience deploying it; however, even a tech savvy individual could and should follow the setup and maintenance of your “cloud” solution. Find out more on Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform website: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure
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Thank you for your interest.