Microsoft now lets companies back up Windows 7 and 8 data in its Azure cloud

Microsoft is expanding the backup capabilities of its public cloud, announcing today that it will now let companies keep up-to-date copies of files on employee computers running Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.

The expanded Azure Backup service doesn’t move everything on client machines to the cloud every day. “Once the initial backup copy is completed, Azure Backup tracks the changes to the backed up files and efficiently transfers only the changed content over HTTPS,” Microsoft cloud and enterprise program manager Giridhar Mosay wrote in a blog post on the news today.

It’s a big step forward for the growing Microsoft Azure public cloud, and it’s the kind of thing that few cloud providers can do — basically, only those companies that maintain a widely used operating system. Other big cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform, might now start to think harder about what they can do accelerate usage.