Azure ExpressRoute enables you to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that’s on your premises or in a colocation environment. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical connections over the Internet. In some cases, using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premises and Azure can also yield significant cost benefits.
With ExpressRoute, you can establish connections to Azure at an ExpressRoute location (Exchange Provider facility) or directly connect to Azure from your existing WAN network (such as a MPLS VPN) provided by a network service provider.
Storage, Backup and Recovery
ExpressRoute gives you a fast and reliable connection to Azure making it suitable for scenarios like periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery and other high availability strategies. It can also be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data such as datasets for high performance computing applications or moving large VMs between your dev/test environment in Azure and on-premises production environment.
"With Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, enterprise customers now have access to high-performance cloud storage. We have achieved network latency speeds of one to two milliseconds between Microsoft Azure datacenters and our storage.”
Noam Shendar, Vice President of Business Development, Zadara Storage
Extend your datacenter
ExpressRoute allows you to securely add compute and storage capacity to your existing datacenter. With high throughput and fast latencies, Azure will feel like a natural extension to your datacenter so you enjoy the scale and economics of the public cloud without having to compromise on network performance.
"With Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, we are now able to provide near-limitless virtual expansion to existing datacenters, redundant connections, streamlined network engineering, consistent performance, and improved security to an organization of 124,000 employees worldwide.”
Brad Bell, General Manager, Network and Infrastructure Microsoft IT
Build hybrid applications
With predictable, reliable and high-throughput connections offered by ExpressRoute, you can build applications that span on-premises infrastructure and Azure without compromising security or performance. For example, you can have your corporate intranet application running in Azure that authenticates users using an on-premises Active Directory, and serve all corporate users without traffic ever routing through the public Internet.
"By using the auto-scale capabilities in Azure to automatically spin up new virtual machines and add capacity without having to buy new hardware, and by using ExpressRoute to provide high throughput, low latency, reliability, and security, we now have the resources to make a hybrid cloud work.”
Dennis Defensor, Vice President of Sales, Accelera Solutions