Should Your Windows Apps Move To The Cloud?

With the announcement of the Azure Services Platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, new attention has been focused on Windows and its fit with cloud computing. But this interest may be misdirected, as Azure is more interesting today as a new development opportunity than as a Windows deployment option. The truly viable opportunity for Windows applications in the cloud rests with infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and GoGrid. Building off traditional ISP hosting of Windows applications, cloud computing platforms are maturing quickly and deliver a hypervisor-based infrastructure that scales easily while delivering dramatically lower costs that more closely match true consumption. Firms should consider these new deployment options in their server consolidation planning.