While trying to put together a comparison between Windows Azure Pack and Windows Azure, I ended up with a table listed below which doesn’t seem to be very useful. Instead let us see when would someone choose Windows Azure Pack Cloud installation on premise vs. onboarding simply to Windows Azure public cloud.

Some of the reasons to choose in-house Windows Azure Pack cloud for an enterprise are:

• Compliance and Policies
• High business impact applications and data has to remain in-house due to company policy
• Internal only application mandate
• Security Concerns
• Afraid of data going through internet
• It feels secured to keep the data inside the perimeter and don’t want to take a chance
• Consolidate existing in-house resources
• Millions of dollars are spent in maintaining clusters of servers for various divisions and teams in an enterprise, most of them often being under utilized at various stages
• WAP provides an opportunity to bring them all under one administration by moving them to Virtual Machines and Services managed from one central portal
• SQL Servers, IIS Web Servers, Services on Virtual Machines etc. can be consolidated and pooled to serve more needs with the same amount of resource and also cuts ongoing management costs and process overheads
• Leverage existing hardware and software to provide modern cloud features such as easy scalability, high availability and flexibility
  
  
• Self-Service & Agility
• With WAP, development teams can procure resources as easy as a single click from WAP Self-service tenant portal
• Long gone are the process to get approvals, waiting for setup etc.
• IT administrators can increase the capacity as need grows seamlessly without end user impact
• Un-used resources can be scaled down easily and let it available for other projects and teams
• When there is a need to increase the scale, WAP portal provides single click scale out. No lengthy process and dialogs with admins when your application is trying hard to serve
• With self-services comes responsibility and having proper gates. WAP enables IT administrators to set Quotas and monitor usage via WAP admin portal
• This specific point is mainly applies when comparing with traditional IT process for procuring and allocating resources, not necessarily with Windows Azure. As Windows Azure also provides same agility and flexibility.
  
  
• Transparency, Visibility and Collaboration
• Windows Azure Pack admin Portal shows all the applications, servers and their users transparently for the IT administrators
• In-house applications, their usage are made discoverable, easy to consume and visible for anyone in the organization
• Windows Azure Portal being the central place for administrators and developers serves as a place for collaboration. Teams can discover another teams web applications or other resources easily. If a team or project depends on certain application, it is now so much easier to monitor the dependent services, talk to their owners etc.