Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing operating system. It enables the development of cloud based applications using Azure’s Services platform. Hosting on Azure comes at $0.12/hour while storage is at $0.15GB per month. The company claims that over 3000 apps have been developed on the platform.

Microsoft has finally embraced the cloud it appears, exemplified by a recent talk by Ballmer http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2010/03-04Cloud.mspx. A rather late entrant to this area, it will be interesting to watch how Microsoft differentiates itself against established offerings such as Amazon Web Services and Google Apps Platform.

One thing is clear, though. Cloud Computing definitely promises to be the next big thing. What was considered to be more hype than substance not so long ago is now becoming a part of enterprise strategy.

Would welcome comments and experiences on use of cloud computing.

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The recent cloud computing catastrophe of T-Mobile, whose Sidekick mobile computing device lost its customers a lot of data, brings to the forefront the question of data integrity in a cloud-computing environment.  And while I agree that it is a disaster for the T-mobile customers, I feel it is not really a problem with cloud storage per se, but with cloud (or indeed any server) storage done badly.  Where ever you store your data, there should be a back-up, either automatic or otherwise.   As Martin Glassborow of StorageBod says, the Sidekick incident “should not be seen as a failure of the Cloud; it’s not! It’s the failure of a centralised service which was apparently run by incompetents! It is yet another lesson that if you only have a single copy of your data; you might as well only have no copies of your data. So if you are archiving and deleting, you better make sure that you have two copies of the archive or at least the ability to recreate that data.”

I think the advantages that cloud computing provides – offloading infrastructure and creating centralized data centres – are important enough that the cloud storage business will survive in the long run, though the T-Mobile/Sidekick/Microsoft fiasco will cause many organizations to hold back for a while.

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