ExpressRoute

Make your connections fast, reliable, and private

Use Azure ExpressRoute to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on your premises or in a colocation environment. ExpressRoute connections don't go over the public Internet, and they offer more reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies than typical Internet connections. In some cases, using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premises systems and Azure can give you significant cost benefits.

With ExpressRoute, establish connections to Azure at an ExpressRoute location, such as an Exchange provider facility, or directly connect to Azure from your existing WAN network, such as a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) VPN, provided by a network service provider.

Directly connect to Azure from a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) VPN

Use a virtual private cloud for storage, backup, and recovery

ExpressRoute gives you a fast and reliable connection to Azure, which makes it excellent for scenarios like periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery, and other high-availability strategies. It can be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data, such as datasets for high-performance computing applications, or moving large virtual machines between your dev-test environment in an Azure virtual private cloud and your 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

Use ExpressRoute to 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, build applications that span on-premises infrastructure and Azure without compromising privacy or performance. For example, run a corporate intranet application in Azure that authenticates your customers with an on-premises Active Directory service, and serve all of your corporate customers 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