If you are, or have ever used, a company to manage you a website or a mobile app, you may have come across the word 'host.' Typically a host, or a hosting company, provides the necessary infrastructure for your website or app to be available on the world wide web (www).

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By using the infrastructure of a hosting company you can be assured that the various technical requirements including bandwidth, are being managed without you having to learn, implement and optimise the infrastructure as per your requirements. Additionally you can be assured, that for the most part, your website/app is available to the whole world 24/7, all year round. 

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Using a similar approach organisations such as Microsoft have developed, over the last decade, a powerful, cost-effective global provision of serviced, managed data-servers and a whole lot of security to transfer all your on-premises hardware and software applications on to their infrastructure. This is known as cloud-hosting.

 

Microsoft call their robust solution 'Azure' - a cloud computing service for building, testing, deploying and managing all your hardware infrastructure, firewalls, security and of course your management software applications using their managed data centres.