Quest Software introduced in beta a set of IT management services hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform.

Quest's OnDemand products will manage IT environments in the cloud through collaboration with Microsoft's Windows Identity Foundation and Active Directory Federation Services in the data center. WIF will provide identity management, authentication and authorization for secure access to cloud-based applications, and Active Directory will issue a federated identity that will be recognized in Azure and the data center.

The new Quest products include Recovery Manager OnDemand, which provides scheduled backups and object-level recovery of Active Directory data. In addition, Quest has released in beta InTrust OnDemand, which collects, stores, reports and alerts on event data from Windows systems. InTrust is meant to help organizations comply with external regulations, internal policies and best practices.

Both Quest products are scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of next year on a subscription basis.

Quest also plans to roll out what it calls Site Administrator Reports OnDemand, which will enable an organization to run overview reports on Azure-hosted applications through Microsoft SharePoint. The product will be available at no cost.

Quest introduced its new services at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the same day Microsoft launched Azure in beta. Quest launched a site for organizations to register to participate in the OnDemand betas.

Microsoft's platform-as-a-service is scheduled to be available for production use in January. The software maker designed Azure to federate internal Windows Server operations in the data center and pooled, virtualized Windows Server clusters in the cloud.

Unified computing platforms promise to consolidate everything and anything into a single chassis. Find out about that and more in Network Computing's second all-digital issue. Download the issue here (registration required).