Assign public IP addresses to your virtual machines so they become directly addressable, and eliminate the need to map an endpoint for direct access. Once you're done, you'll be able to do things like run FTP servers in Azure and monitor virtual machines directly using their IPs. The virtual machine will also use this public IP as its outgoing IP for all connections that is sourced from this VM. During preview you get two free public IP addresses per subscription.
For more information visit the
MSDN page on Instance level Public IPs