Equinix has teamed up with Microsoft to offer secure direct connections to Microsoft Azure in its data centers, with the service to become available in all Equinix’s 16 markets around the world.

ExpressRoute offers private secure low latency connections between customer data centers and Microsoft Azure and so bypasses the public internet.

Microsoft - like Amazon Web Services with its Direct Connect service - has been pushing the service hard since its launch in February and signed up a number of network service providers to provide private connections.

The deal with Equinix is Microsoft’s first with a large data center and colocation provider.

Customers interested in previewing the solution can connect to ExpressRoute via Equinix’s London, Silicon Valley and Washington DC data centers.

Equinix’s VP of cloud innovation, Chris Sharp, thinks the alliance means huge advantages for all concerned because it resolves the latency and security concerns that many enterprises have over placing applications and data in the cloud and using the public internet. He predicts that many more companies will start to rethink their cloud architecture.

“It means enterprises can finally consume services in the way they want to and it allows them to architect an elastic hybrid cloud. They can attain the elasticity they want in a global environment, they can leverage private access and overcome the limitations of the internet,” he said.

Sharp expects early traction to come from multinational companies, followed by customers in North America, with Asia-Pacific and Europe to follow.

He gave the example of Equinix customer FourSquare, when the company migrated from a public to a hybrid cloud architecture-  using the Amazon public cloud for data warehousing and spikes in performance as well as its own private cloud  - doubled its transaction processing capabilities while keeping costs flat.

Microsoft’s general manager of Microsoft Azure, Steve Martin, said that 57% of Fortune 500 companies are already using Microsoft Azure combined with Equinix’s global data center footprint.

“We look forward to working together to help customers bridge their cloud and on-premises technology to build hybrid environments with enterprise-grade control and reliability,” Martin said.

The service will become generally available in these markets in the “late spring” and rolled out to other markets through the rest of this year.