Ability to Scale on Demand It can be hard to predict how your business will grow, or if and when you will require extra resources for short term 'bursts' of traffic or transaction volume. Increased growth or other demands often demands running applications with high load, or additional applications that most traditional hosting models cannot handle.
So it's a big advantage that Azure was built to scale alongside your business. One way Azure does this is by loading your applications as a cluster that allocates a web application to a specific set of processes. The result is that all of your applications are not forced to run off a single server and you will thus never run out of server capacity. As a bonus, Azure can even be managed to auto scale based on load or schedule.
Flexibility In the quickly evolving technology sector you need a hosting solution that can quickly evolve as your needs change. Azure is simple to adapt and offers a host of application building blocks and services that will allow you to customise the cloud as needed.
Cost Competitive With Microsoft’s huge customer base, they have been able to pass volume discounts on to their customers. And it's a good bet that Azure costs will go down as the competition heats up with AWS and Google. Additionally, Azure works off a pay-as-you-go model, which reduces the upfront costs to small businesses and those that sign a contract can receive an additional enterprise discount. If you are worried about price increases, you can be assured they have pledged to maintain their AWS-comparable pricing for the general public.
Customer support Azure infrastructure is now in 19 regions across the globe, with multiple data center regions in the US, Europe, China, Asia and the Pacific. They provide support plans in English and Japanese and offer support plans in many more languages.
Hybrid Capability Unlike AWS’s cloud only approach, Windows Azure provides you with the ability to create hybrid environments, allowing you to leverage your on-premise resources and the benefits of the cloud without costly workarounds. With Azure you can also build hybrid applications.