The cloud has reached an inflection point. For the past 10 years, enterprises have dabbled in the cloud. Many have purchased multi-tenant cloud applications (SaaS) to support various functions, such as payroll, sales, human resources, and business intelligence. Some have offloaded data processing functions to virtual servers in the cloud (IaaS) or shifted development and test environments to cloud-based platforms (PaaS).  Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are the top three public cloud providers and continuously leapfrog each other with functionality. Of the three, Microsoft is designed more as a platform-as-a-service than an infrastructure-as-a-service. That means it’s geared as much to business people who want to benefit from cloud services as developers and IT administrators.