There are many tangible benefits of building solutions on Azure today. A few of these include the ability to scale up/down the platform based on predictable or dynamic shifts in application load and throughput requirements without worrying about the hardware procurement time and setup, the ability to pay as you go with expense incurred as an Operational Expenditure (OpEx) instead of a Capital Expenditure (CapEx), and the increase in reach for certain integration scenarios.
Specific to integration on Azure, there are four factors that drive adoption:
Focus on business operations, not IT: There are business benefits in terms of reduced cost by leveraging platforms running under economy of scale, making it cheaper for customers to obtain them with higher quality of services. The need of the hour is to simplify IT deployment and management and focus on business services instead of configuring software or hardware.
Simplicity of managing externally facing services: Enterprises typically offer services across geographic and organizational boundaries. Many of these services require making changes to the corporate firewall to allow or deny the applications. This process is an IT nightmare for many organizations. With Azure integration services such as B2B, which inherently require external communication, all this could be moved to the cloud and the necessary access and control policies could then be centralized for all internal services. This also enables self-service configuration changes to the application, thereby dramatically improving responsiveness to business changes.
Greenfield cloud applications: The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets as well as Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, has given rise to services that are inherently cloud based. Think of a POS that transmits daily transaction logs to its backend Line-of-Business systems or an RFID service that transmits information about each item in a shopping cart purchased in a retail store to an inventory application. As new services are being rolled out, organizations want to be able to develop and deploy these services with shorter time-to-market using Azure.
Another factor to consider for the cloud is to leverage existing on-premises investments. Businesses have invested in a variety of on-premises systems, including traditional ERP as well as legacy mainframes and other bespoke systems that literally run the business.