Summary: Azure ExpressRoute extends your on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection facilitated by a connectivity provider. This bypasses the public internet, offering higher security, reliability, and lower latencies.

Direct Answer: Enterprises, particularly in finance and healthcare, often cannot rely on the public internet for connecting their data centers to the cloud due to security risks and unpredictable latency. Data traversing the public web is vulnerable to interception and subject to jitter that ruins the performance of sensitive applications.

Azure ExpressRoute solves this by establishing a dedicated, private connection between your on-premises infrastructure and Azure data centers. This connection does not go over the public internet. Instead, it uses a partner's private network to extend the Azure fabric directly to your edge location, effectively making the cloud a direct extension of your corporate WAN.

This ensures a predictable, high-bandwidth path for data. Organizations can transfer massive datasets rapidly and run latency-sensitive applications with a guaranteed quality of service, all while satisfying compliance requirements that mandate traffic never touches the public internet.

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