Microsoft Dynamics apps have been hosted by third-party partners for years, and those services are still available, but the new Azure option will enable customers to host their deployments in a private cloud on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine. Scale, supporting virtualization and development tools and speed of deployment were all cited as advantages of deploying on Azure. A customer can be up and running on a full system within one hour, whereas this used to take as much as three weeks depending on the state of the client infrastructure.
Azure hosting is strictly offered through Microsoft partners, and not directly through Microsoft. Pricing is based on database size and support required with 6 and 12 month payment plans available.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
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