Summary

With the advent of the Windows Azure platform, it is increasingly becoming the platform choice for handling load burst and failover scenarios. With the support for the various features such as out of the box high availability, really high SLAs (99.99) guarantees, elastic scale across "infinite" resources, and importantly, consumption-based pricing model, it now becomes compelling for enterprises and small medium businesses to leverage it for lowering TCO. However, there are a set of design criteria and corporate policies that need to be considered to allow mixed access patterns where the various tiers—web, business, and data tier can access the on-premise or the cloud hosted logic. Such a mixed deployment model lets companies leverage their existing infrastructure and complement it with the elastic aspects of the Windows Azure platform, thus lowering the operation costs.