The Microsoft Cloud and Azure operating system reduces businesses' hosting and infrastructure costs, claimed Dot Net Solutions.

According to the UK-based software development company, Cloud appeals to large businesses that have built their own applications themselves and want to upload them onto Microsoft to save on infrastructure costs.

Traditionally companies have had to be responsible for website maintenance and updating all their own equipment on their premises or at external data centres which requires high investment costs for servicing and IT staff.

But Dot Net Solutions chief executive officer Dan Scarfe said: "If you push all of that information up into the cloud it is Microsoft’s gear and everything is taken care of for you."

Microsoft has announced plans to purchase 10,000 new servers every month for every data centre which highlights the scale of the Cloud - by comparison, Facebook runs 10,000 servers globally.

Some key elements of the Azure service platform include a hosting and management service, computation, networking and low-level scalable storage.

It will also provide users with the ability to share, store and synchronise documents, photos, files and information across various platforms, from PCs to phones, all around the world.