Bell and Microsoft have teamed up to bring Microsoft’s could service, Azure, to Canadian businesses. On May 10, Microsoft announced that Azure would be generally available in data centre regions in Toronto and Quebec City.

The ExpressRoute

“We are excited to add Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute to our Bell Business Cloud ecosystem, providing customers with more of the seamless integration they have come to expect. Bell’s high-speed private connection to Microsoft’s cloud services will help even more Canadian businesses move confidently to the cloud,” said Tom Little, President of Bell Business Markets in an article on Mobile Syrup.

Microsoft claims that the ExpressRoute offers Canadians the ability to establish private connections to the Microsoft cloud with reduced latency when compared to standard internet connections.

Real business benefits

Besides the connection advantages, there are some benefits that small businesses especially can take advantage of.

One feature that Azure offers is scalability, which is very important for small businesses that don’t know how big they are going to grow, or how fast.

Azure loads applications as a cluster which then allocates a web application to a specific set of processes. What this means is that not all applications will be running off of just one server, meaning that server capacity won’t be a limitation.

Also, Microsoft has an incentive to keep Azure cost competitive as it will likely want to keep up with AWS and Google.

As it is now, Azure works on a pay-as-you-go model, which can save small businesses a lot of upfront costs.

Being available in 19 regions across the globe, Azure also already offers flexibility to Canadian businesses that are international or are looking to expand.

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Nick Seebruch

I am an External writer at ShoutEx. My interest lie in marketing, communications and journalism