Microsoft announces Windows Azure, new cloud-based services for businesses

Software giant Microsoft has announced its Windows Azure platform will be operating at full capacity on 1 January, offering cloud services to businesses that can be accessed from both PCs and smartphones.

The announcement comes just a few weeks after the company warned businesses of the dangers of cloud computing, saying privacy issues could become a problem when accessing data under different jurisdictions.

The new features were also unveiled ahead of a major announcement from Google, which is expected to reveal the company’s open-source, and cloud-heavy, Chrome operating system.

The new features to Azure were announced at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference, with company server and tools president Bob Muglia saying the developer’s platform will be open for use in January.

“Over the past year the industry understanding of the cloud has really evolved. One thing that has become very clear is that the cloud is about more than infrastructure: it’s also an application model,” Muglia said. “Microsoft has learned about how to build the next-generation application model.”

Chief software architect Ray Ozzie explained the new tools, which include a cloud-based desktop virtualisation feature, and said the company is aiming for a “three screens and a cloud” offering, where users can access the same types of data through PCs, smartphones and televisions.

Azure, which is mostly geared towards software developers, will feature new services that allow developers to create and manage applications based on servers and in the “cloud”. A variety of new features will also allow developers to access additional storage capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis.

It is made up of three parts: Windows Azure, a cloud-based operating system, SQL Azure, a cloud-based database system and new .NET services that provide support for applications.

Virtual machine support will also be included on Azure, enabling users to access content contained on in-house servers and data centres in the cloud.

A new type of online marketplace was also revealed for Azure, which will see software developers place their products on the cloud. Developers can load their apps onto both private and public cloud-based data centres.

The company hopes the new services will compete with Google and Amazon’s own offerings, and said the take-up of its new application services by developers will prompt it to add more features as necessary.

“What’s important is to begin to evolve these applications,” Muglia said, “to take advantage of the attributes that the cloud delivers.”

But the support comes a fortnight after the company issued a warning to companies about using cloud-based services, saying many businesses often do not know where their data is being held.

“Cloud computing does raise a number of important policy questions concerning how people, organisations and governments handle information and interactions in this environment,” Microsoft said.

“Privacy protections are essential to building the customer trust needed for cloud computing and the internet to reach their full potential.”