Cloudtidings.com

Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure ExpressRoute service.

ExpressRoute allows you to connect your existing datacenters to Azure without having to flow any traffic over the public Internet, and enable–guaranteed network quality-of-service and the ability to use Azure as a natural extension of an existing private network or datacenter.

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

Microsoft is also offering enterprise SLA for the service, as well as a variety of bandwidth tiers.

Several provider partnerships with ExpressRoute are in place, including: AT&T, Equinix, Verizon, BT, Level3, TelecityGroup, SingTel and, Zadara.

Here you can find pricing details about the service: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/expressroute/

ExpressRoute will allow you to build applications that span on-premises infrastructure and Azure without compromising security or performance. For example, you can have your corporate front end intranet application running in Azure (SharePoint for example) and the back end using an on-premises SQL Server, serving all corporate users without traffic ever routing through the public Internet. This can also be used to guarantee, if you have data sovereignty policies that your data will always stays in the country.

You can get more information on the ExpressRoute website.