Last week I attended microsoft startup party for bizspark registered companies. A few new offers from Microsoft was presented, including Azure.

Azure is Microsoft's plan for clouding computing. Quite some Microsoft's products, like msn 9, live search, skydrive, are already running on the azure platform, however, it has yet to be released to public to use. 

It is a good product, i think. If we don't have to invest intensively in a server to run our applications and services.

However, I feel the plan was missing something for business applications.

1. the azure platform needs us to re-write our program a bit in order to run on the platform. for example, the file system is different.  You have to store your uploaded files into database (expensive!). 

2. there is no data backup features. For normal sql server, we schedule backups. For azure sql, there is no such thing. You cant do backup, unless you program one.

I havent gone deep into azure. But I believe the first versions may need to improve further to run business applications. Normal web sites, certainly no problem.