For the kick-off of its annual Tech Ed user conference, being held this week in Houston, Microsoft has released a bevy of tools and services to help administrators connect their internal operations to Microsoft's Azure cloud.



From Network World:

For the kick-off of its annual Tech Ed user conference, being held this week in Houston, Microsoft has released a bevy of tools and services to help administrators connect their internal operations to Microsoft's Azure cloud.

"This is about leveraging assets that organizations already have in their data centers," said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise division.

This year's conference will emphasize the hybrid cloud, in which an enterprise can run some operations in house, while shifting others to cloud services. Nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by 2017, IT analyst firm Gartner estimated.

  Microsoft Azure tools aim to help companies manage hybrid clouds