Azure!... god bless you!!!

Although I have some experience with Microsoft Azure, I do sometimes have difficulty articulating what is is and what is does. I think one of the best explanations I've heard come from Bob Tabor of Microsoft. He explains that "Microsoft Azure allows you to perform virtually any compute or data storage operation by provisioning and scaling the necessary resources on demand and a pay-as-you-go basis". Sounds simple, don't it? 

So I present the cloud computing stack.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With IaaS you manage everything that runs within the OS, and your cloud provider handles the rest: the physical management of the servers, taking care of storage and the network, virtualization, backup power, etc

Platform as a Service (PaaS) With the OS, the middleware and the runtime are now also managed by the cloud provider, so you can focus mainly on how to build your application and where to put the data. 

Software as a Service (SaaS). This is where you simply want to use some software without having to worry about anything else. 

You can also mix and match the different levels of service, depending on how much control you want to maintain. So to explain this I once again reference an explanation from someone much smarter than me (but not as good looking), Scott Hanselman. The different levels of "control" can be compared to the differences between  owning a home, renting a room (or a home) or renting a hotel room.

So what would be the advantages of employing such a solution?