Using a cloud computing platform service like Windows Azure provides companies with numerous benefits.
Faster time to market– Since you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure or platform and only focus on developing the functionality of your business application it is completed in a fraction of the time, thus reducing your time to market.
Reduced costs– Since you are only paying for what you are using, the pay-as-you-grow model, reduces the upfront costs. Since Microsoft can pass on volume discounts to their customers the ongoing costs are also lower than if you were to host the full platform yourself.
Increased scalability– As your customer base grows and the usage of your application increases you can just add additional capacity to make sure your application is running smoothly. You don’t ever have to worry about running out of server capacity.
More flexibility and creativity– Applications are very quickly deployed to the Windows Azure platform which means that changes are applied without any downtime.