Now I do think that, for some businesses and some cases, there are indeed some great advantages to the SQL Data Services I can think of.
There are a lot of small businesses out there that are probably not willing to invest in a serious IT hard- and softwareplatform themselves. Let's face it: Buying and maintaining one or more servers is a serious investment. Especially if you need to work out backup and fallback scenario's. With the Azure Services Platform and SQL Data Services, a small company can have a state-of-the-art IT platform, by (probably) a fraction of the cost. From a hardware perspective, they can compete with the infrastructure of a very large company with a relativily small investment.
Another advantage is that you as a company only need to pay for servers / memory / diskspace / bandwith you actually consume. If one day your business should decrease, for instance because of a (global) crisis, the cost of the required IT infrastructure can decrease as well.
Another advantage is that new projects can be build on a serious infrastructure from the ground up. Non-business critical projects, test-cases and even proof-of-concepts can still make use of a state-of-the-art hardware platform, without making the initial cost towards hardware. If, for some reason, the project fails, is cancelled or becomes irrelevant to the business, a company is not stuck with expensive IT equipment it must get rid off.
Even from an environmental standpoint there can be a positive note to add. If Microsoft builds their datacenters in cool environments, like Alaska, the cost on f.i. airconditioning can be a huge energy saving. Since everything is running on virtual machines, resources can also be optimally used. If, for instance your business is not working 24/7, and your server is not doing anything important during the night, it's CPU-power, memory and other resources can easily be used to support a business in America that requires a lot of resources at that time.
Enough stuff to think about I guess ...
By David Stroobants, .Net Solutions Architect