Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

• Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
• Reliable: Microsoft’s portion of ExpressRoute is covered by an SLA of 99.9%. Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) provides an SLA of 99.999% when redundancy is configured using an active – active router configuration.
• High Speed speeds differ between NSP and IXP connections – but go from 10Mbps up to 10Gbps. ECX provides three choices of virtual circuit speeds in Australia: 200Mbps, 500Mbps…