The service includes single billing facilities for the BT Compute and Azure services. With the latest SMB 3.0 protocol, applications can maintain a secure, persistent connection. The libraries have been tested on the board and can be used with mbed applications through the mbed developer website to enable direct connectivity with the Azure IoT Suite. Microsoft has announced that the Azure IoT suite is also available for purchasing.

Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way applications, virtualised servers and cloud storage are delivered and consumed, to become Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

The offer builds on BT's vision of the Cloud of Clouds by enabling its corporate customers to establish a privacy-enhanced, managed connection to consume Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 capabilities with the highly predictable performance and the reliability that comes with dedicated connectivity.

"Building on today's certifications, we are committed to working closely with Texas Instruments on industrial, automotive and consumer applications certified for Microsoft Azure IoT Suite". The service, which will also be able to deploy, scale, and orchestrate Swarm-based solutions, will be available in preview by the end of the year.

Microsoft has announced the Azure Container Service - this is an open source scheduling and orchestration service which will help the users build a partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. Available in more than 170 markets around the globe, Private IP delivers scalability, varying classes of service, expansive reach and exceptional service counting stringent service level agreements for latency and packet-loss. Helping customers be productive from day one, Azure Data Lake makes big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible for everyone.

The public cloud has created healthy competition among the platform companies. In third place, in terms of revenue and customers, comes Google Cloud. They are competing both on the price point and functionality, which is ultimately benefitting customers. Chicago is close to the Microsoft data center in Iowa, and he expects most ExpressRoute customers in Ashburn to use Chicago as the failover site. With 24 Azure regions around the world - more than any other major cloud provider - this latest expansion is further proof of Microsoft's commitment to bring its cutting-edge cloud to as many customers as possible. Just ahead of AzureCon, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made this announcement during his meeting with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.

The Azure ExpressRoute offering comes on the back of the recent launch of MTN's pan-African cloud platform, which provides customers with hybrid cloud solution services from MTN's data centres. As large customers start to make the switch, existing data center providers such as Tata Communications, Reliance, and Netmagic will begin to feel the heat.