Discussion on:

BYON into the public cloud with Azure Virtual Networks

I haven't paid much attention to Azure until recently, and I couldn't work out how you would communicate with your VMs. Now I know it's just basically via a standard IPSec VPN, that makes it a whole lot more interesting. I can see big benefits to this service, from short-term test & dev deployments to DR/backup scenarios. As long as you don't have massive amounts of data that need to be transferred between Azure and your LAN I think it looks like a great service.