According to a Neovise report published by Forbes, 54% of organizations—ranging from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofit business—are now using public or private cloud resources within their enterprise.

As the Cloud becomes mainstream, a growing number of established companies are implementing cloud solutions into their business model, whereas new startups are building their entire primary data infrastructure on it.

One of these startup organizations is NVoicePay, a young and ambitious financial services solution provider trying to get a leg up in a large market. Their goal: to create a B2B payment network that helps mid-sized businesses reduce or eliminate their paper-based processes when dealing with invoices and associated payments. NVoicePay improves efficiency and lowers cost, saving their clients (mostly auto dealerships) tens of thousands of dollars per year.

In order to support their solution’s success (and improve their own efficiency), the creators of NVoicePay said they needed a cloud platform that was:

• Easy to sign up for and use
• Available on multiple devices (i.e. desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.)
• Able to provide robust security features
• Able to handle bursts of heavy traffic

“We anticipated going through explosive growth with our transactions,” said Shaun McAravey, Chief Technology Officer for NVoicePay in a Microsoft case study about the development of his company. “We started looking at cloud platforms for the scalability in storage and in compute resources to handle anticipated traffic.”

Not long after, they found their solution in Azure.

When an NVoicePay client pays a vendor, the transaction goes through a small data center run by NVoicePay. Their servers store customer information and are responsible for the actual execution of the transaction, which adhere to PCI standards by never putting customer identity or financial information in the Cloud.

However, the rest of their computing is powered by Microsoft Azure, which takes care of notifying both parties of payments, updating customer accounting services, processing the encoded version of the customer’s identity, synchronizing databases supported by Azure’s AppFabric, and more.

McAravey said they evaluated alternative cloud platforms to use for NVoicePay, but other solutions failed to provide the depth and breadth of features available with Azure.

“Windows Azure provides scalable storage and compute resources and a flexible pay-as-you-go business model,” said McAravey. “And with Windows Azure AppFabric, we can integrate with our clients’ on-premises services, provide enhanced security to protect financial data, and implement single sign-on for our system.”

When asked about why they decided to go with Microsoft’s cloud platform, rather than Google or Amazon, Karla Friede, Chief Executive Officer of NVoicePay, simply responded: “Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to the cloud, and based on that we bet our future on it.”

Learn more about how NVoicePay is using the Cloud to support their business by checking out the Microsoft case study. And we invite you to consider choosing Microsoft Azure as the beginning of your path to the Cloud!