Cost considerations for deploying Office 365 with single sign-on and Azure Virtual Machines

  • Article

 

Applies to: Office 365

Summary: Describes the costs associated with deploying Azure Virtual Machines.

We're listening to your feedback and consolidating all our Office 365 deployment content. On July 1st, 2015, all information in this guide will be moved to https://support.office.com/, and these pages will be removed from TechNet. As you review the content still on TechNet, you'll notice many have links pointing to the new content already on https://support.office.com/.

To explore content available on https://support.office.com/, start with the Office 365 for business - Admin Help page.

You can see the pricing for Azure services on the Microsoft Azure site. Licensing details aren’t included in this article because they may change over time. This article briefly describes cost factors to consider when choosing between more traditional deployments and Azure Virtual Machines.

Cost considerations for Azure

Azure cost factors that you should consider include the following:

  • The size and number of virtual machines. Windows Server licensing costs may be included. Compute hours don’t include any Azure storage costs that are associated with the Windows Server image running in virtual machines. These costs are billed separately.

  • Azure storage requirements. Charges apply for Azure storage costs that are required for virtual machines.

  • Azure Virtual Network. Charges apply for the creation of a virtual private network (VPN) connection between a virtual network and your VPN gateway. The charge is for each hour that the VPN connection is provisioned and available (a VPN connection hour). It should be 24 hours a day, seven days a week. All data transferred over the VPN connection is charged separately at the Azure standard data transfer rates.

  • Network traffic. Outbound data is charged based on the total amount of data moving out of the Azure datacenters through the Internet in a given billing cycle. This applies to any traffic, including traffic that traverses the VPN tunnel. In this article, outbound directory synchronization traffic is expected to represent the most significant portion of the network traffic, depending on the amount of directory changes.

  • Support. Azure offers flexible support options for organizations of all sizes. Enterprises that deploy business-critical applications in Azure should consider additional support options.

Estimating the cost

To help you estimate the overall cost of your solution, we have an online pricing calculator.