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Microsoft this week continued its aggressive moves in the enterprise cloud market. The company released new features for Windows Azure that include new push notification capabilities for mobile apps as well as support for SQL Server AlwaysOn, a disaster recovery technology.

SQL Server AlwaysOn, which was introduced in SQL Server 2012, includes support for multi-database fallover, multiple replicas, readable secondaries and other features designed to keep businesses running in the event that a database goes down. Microsoft said that Azure virtual machines can now run the complete SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group Technology stack. The company said the addition should improve the availability of SQL servers while also improving efficiency by allowing users to offload BI reporting tasks and backups to secondary machines.

With the addition of SQL Server AlwaysOn support, Microsoft clearly hopes that more customers will use Azure to host their workloads. That said, the company knows that many businesses prefer to host their own content, so it is pitching AlwaysOn as not only a cloud enabler but also a supplement to on-premises systems. The company noted that if a local data center fails, Azure allows users to failover to virtual machines hosted in Azure, meaning that even if businesses don't want their primary operations in the cloud, they might still employ the technology as a contingency.