Making the shift to Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud requires convincing end users that the experience they will get will be at least as good as running instances of Microsoft Office on their local desktop. Unfortunately, the quality of the Internet connection that end users receive around not only the globe, but even local markets tends to vary greatly.

To provide end users with a more consistent Microsoft Office 365 application experience in the cloud, Equinix (EQUX) today formally announced that it will make use of Azure ExpressRoute to provide a managed service via the Equinix Cloud Exchange to access Microsoft Office 365 applications.

Scheduled to be available in the third quarter, Chris Sharp, vice president of cloud innovation at Equinix, says this offering is the first of many application specific private network connections that Equinix plans to make available both direct and via a newly launched channel program.

Equinix already has an existing alliance with Microsoft through which it offers direct connection to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute in 15 markets globally; including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Osaka, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. The current Equinix plan is to provide direct access to Office 365 in all 15 of those markets.

In addition to providing a better application experience, Sharp adds that a direct connection to Microsoft Azure also provides a more secure network alternative to the public Internet that is currently used by most organizations to access Microsoft Office 365.

The public Internet isn’t really much of an option for application developers that want to build applications on top of Microsoft Office 365. While Microsoft has standardized the Microsoft Office 365 application programming interfaces, applications that invoke those APIs are often sensitive to network latency. For application ecosystem to thrive on top of Microsoft Office 365, Sharp notes that more often than not those applications will need a direct network connection that is provided more efficiently through an elastic Equinix network.

Furthermore, many enterprise IT applications have customized their local Microsoft Office 365 applications. Moving those applications into the cloud would require a high degree of confidence that in the performance of those applications over a network connection to a remote data center.

For all the hype surrounding the cloud most IT professionals are aware that the laws of physics still apply when it comes to accessing applications across a network. For solution providers across the channel, that should create an opportunity to provide a superior application experience via the cloud in a way that winds up being a whole lot more profitable than using a standard public Internet connection.