Websites and web services are used for everything these days. With the evolution of "The Cloud" we are accessing more and more via web browsers than we ever have before. The cloud can mean very different things to different people, but what I see most commonly in the enterprise is the creation of private clouds. This generally means a collection of web servers that are being used to serve up web applications for the company's user population to work from. Sometimes the private cloud is right onsite in a company datacenter, sometimes it is in a co-location, and sometimes it is a combination of a local datacenter and a true cloud web service provider such as Azure. Whatever defines a private cloud for you, one variable is the same. Your cloud consists of web servers that need to be managed and administered.

For any Microsoft-centric shop, your web servers should be running Windows Server with the Internet Information Services (IIS) role installed. IIS...