What are best features of Microsoft Azure?

Some of the best features of Microsoft Azure are as following:

Azure Files are a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that provides a Windows SMB share in addition to Azure storage. You can access this storage directly using the SMB 2.1 protocol or REST API without requiring that the storage be hosted on an Azure IaaS VM. Azure Files can be shared between multiple Azure VMs and they can also be consumed by Windows and Linux VMs.

Formerly known as Hyper-V Recovery Manager, Azure Site Recovery has extended its capabilities by enabling Azure itself to be a DR replication target. Formerly, Hyper-V Recovery Manager could only replicate Hyper-V VMs between different on-premises locations. The new Microsoft Site Recovery lets you replicate your on-premises VMs to Azure, enabling you to use Azure as a low cost DR solution.

Microsoft provides a number of different VM templates in Azure to enable you to quickly build preconfigured Azure VMs. Microsoft extended the scalability of Azure VMs by providing two new large VM templates. Microsoft Azure now offers the new A8 and A9 VM templates with 8 and 16 cores respectively.

At TechEd 2014, Microsoft stated that they now have 16 different Azure data centers and, for enhanced DR SQL Server 2014, AlwaysOn Availability Groups will support cross-region replication, enabling you to split your SQL Server DR AlwaysOn replicas into separate Azure regions. AlwaysOn secondary replicas in the same region can be setup as synchronous, while secondary replicas in other regions must be asynchronous.

Microsoft also announced that they now support the ability to deploy anti-malware agents in Azure VMs. Azure now supports an extension model that lets you import Microsoft Endpoint Protection (MEP) anti-malware modules into the VM role's definition.  Anti-malware agents are initially available from Symantec, Microsoft, and Trend Micro.

Azure AD is one of Microsoft’s biggest services, with over 300 million users and 2 billion authorizations per day. Azure AD Premium is a service that includes identity and access management (IAM) capabilities for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. AD Premium goes beyond standard Azure by offering a number of features, including an enterprise SLA of 99.9 percent, no limit to the number objects, no limit to the number of SSO applications, and self-service password reset.

Also currently in preview, Azure RemoteApp is essentially Windows Remote Desktop Services for mobile devices. Azure RemoteApp lets you run Windows applications on multiple different clients, including Windows, iOS, and Android. Microsoft makes clients for each of the different platforms. You can download the Azure RemoteApp preview from the Microsoft Azure RemoteApp website.