With the all the interest in Microsoft Windows Azure, it's natural to ask "what does that mean for IT Pros?". There's loads of information to help developers write applications for the cloud, but what about those of us who do infrastructure: servers, networks, and other such things?

One important element is integrating on and off-premise systems and, to do this, Microsoft has created Windows Azure Connect - a new Windows Azure service that enables customers to setup secure, IP-level network connectivity between their Windows Azure compute services and existing, on-premise resources. This allows Windows Azure applications to leverage and integrate with existing infrastructure investments in order to ease adoption of Azure in the enterprise..

The Windows Server User Group (WSUG) is running a Live Meeting on this topic (thanks to a lot of help from Phil Winstanley, ex-MVP and now native at Microsoft).

Our speaker will be Allan Naim, an Azure Architect Evangelist at Microsoft. Allan has more than 15 years of experience designing and building distributed middleware applications including both custom and off the shelf Enterprise Application Integration architectures and, on the evening of 28 March 2011 (starting at 19:00 BST - Eventbrite doesn't recognise BST so it says GMT but it's 7PM UK time!), he'll spend an hour taking us through Windows Azure Connect. 

Details for joining the meeting can be found below (but please register to give us some idea of the number of attendees to expect).

Attendee URL:   https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=NR65H3&role=attend&pw=D%2B%60n7%29dhC
Meeting ID:   NR65H3
Attendee Entry Code:   D+`n7)dhC