Microsoft just announced general availability of its IaaS solution on Microsoft Azure. Which allows you to host Virtual Machine in Azure.
In addition, this opens for more for a lot more possibilities for a hybrid cloud solutions think of the possibilities you have if you could migrate virtual machines to Azure when you are doing maintance or when you just do not have any resources available locally.
You can sign up for a free trial at 90 days -> microsoftazure.com to try it yourself
So what else is new in the Azure front?
Microsoft also announced some more exciting news.
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New VM Image Templates (including SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint images)
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New VM Sizes (including Larger Memory Machines)
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New VM Prices (we’ve reduced prices 21%-33% for IaaS and PaaS VMs)
I have also written before about how to manage Windows Azure trough PowerShell https://msandbu.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/managing-windows-azure-via-windows-powershell/
Windows Azure as Disaster Recovery Solution à
https://msandbu.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/disaster-recovery-as-a-service-meet-azure/
And Integration with Orchestrator à
https://msandbu.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/azure-integration-pack-for-sp1-beta/
And Microsoft has also created a new management pack for deep monitoring on Azure resources including Virtual Machines. So these are truly exciting times.
One of the largest telecom company in the world (Telenor) which is primarily located in Norway has already embraced IaaS on Microsoft Azure; you can read more about how they used the cloud.
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=710000002349
now in order to bridge the gap between your local cloud and the public cloud you need some form of gateway.
Citrix has recently announced that its platform Cloud gateway with added support for Azure, this allows you to bridge your Azure cloud with your private cloud.
https://www.citrix.com/downloads/cloudbridge/betas-and-tech-previews/cloudbridge-azure-integration (Note that this requires mycitrix login) This technology uses an IPsec tunnel to encrypt data back and forth and is transparent to all applications running over it.
Cloudbridge can be bought as an separate applicance or as a part of Netscaler.