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To date, many enterprise IT organizations have tiptoed carefully in and around the cloud as they consider the types of software applications and IT infrastructure they’re willing to entrust to third-party providers amid security, data privacy and reliability concerns.
And while some of most notable managed services providers – namely Google and Amazon – have landed a few brand-name customers such as The Nasdaq Stock Market and The New York Times, many enterprise CIOs continue to remain cautious about committing mission-critical applications to the cloud.
That may change with the availability of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
Azure, which was unveiled by Microsoft at its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, has three primary components: Windows Azure, a cloud services operating system which provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Web applications; an SQL Azure database element and Azure.Net services.
Microsoft is offering customers three ways to use the platform: a pay-as-you-go model, a subscription format and volume licensing. The consumption model will cost 12 cents per hour for infrastructure usage and 15 cents per gigabyte for storage. For Azure services, customers will pay 10 cents per gigabyte for incoming data and 15 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Though it’s tough to make apples-to-apples price comparisons between cloud services, Azure’s compute services is competitively priced against Amazon’s EC2 service.
Pricing for SQL Azure is $99.99 for up to a 10 GB relational database.
Microsoft officials have said that they intend to have more details on Azure pricing in November when the services are available commercially. But they’ve indicated that they intend to keep Azure pricing separate from its traditional premise-based software pricing in order to make it easier for enterprise customers to track.
While Windows Azure is predominantly being targeted at developers and ISVs where they can build applications using .Net, Ruby on Rails, Java and other languages, the platform itself may appeal to enterprise IT shops. Microsoft is including a service-level agreement that guarantees 99.9% uptime for storage and 99.95% uptime for compute services. Removing the headaches of software patch management will certainly be appealing to some enterprise customers, though only one factor for them to consider in weighing Microsoft’s cloud services.
Some critics have argued that Microsoft is late to the game as competitors such as Google and Amazon have gained early footing in the cloud space. But to date, Google and Amazon’s clouds have appealed primarily to small-to-medium sized businesses while Microsoft’s experiences in the enterprise should bode well for helping it to land some premium accounts. You can bet that Microsoft's salespeople will be working aggressively to broker deals with its traditional enterprise licensing customers.
It's also important to remember this: in the grand scheme of cloud computing, it’s only the beginning of the battle for enterprise customers.
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