Innovate Anywhere with Azure
Drive innovation across your hybrid and multi-cloud environments with Azure
If you’re like most organizations – there’s a good chance that your technology footprint continues to grow in complexity with the influx of new technologies and platform investments. Many of our clients have applications running across a diverse infrastructure with data centers, hosting environments, branch offices as well as multi-cloud, where we see two or more clouds being used. To add to this complexity, IT teams are using different development tools, languages, and frameworks as well as approaches like Opensource, Kubernetes and DevOps.
Have you ever found yourself asking any of the following questions?
- How do I govern and secure resources seamlessly regardless of where they are running?
- How can I bring cloud innovation to existing infrastructure?
- Is it possible to modernize local datacenters with new cloud infrastructure?
- How do I extend compute and AI to the edge to unlock new business scenarios?
Reasons for a Hybrid or Multicloud Strategy
Azure Arc
To support the momentum of hybrid and multicloud environments, Azure gives customers the flexibility to innovate anywhere in their environment. It’s starts with Azure Arc. Azure Arc enables you to standardize visibility, operations, and compliance across a wide range of resources and locations by extending the Azure control plane. Right from Azure, you can easily organize, govern, and secure Windows, Linux, SQL server, and Kubernetes clusters across data centers, edge, and multi-cloud. Enabled by Azure Arc, you can bring Azure services to any existing infrastructure including other clouds you are using, so you can take advantage of cloud benefits everywhere, such as scalability, fast deployment, and always up-to-date cloud innovation. You can build Azure-consistent new cloud infrastructure in your own datacenter with Azure Stack, so you can modernize your datacenter and run cloud native applications on-premises while taking advantage of existing investments and meeting regulatory compliances. You can extend Artificial Intelligence (AI) to edge devices with Azure IoT, so you can run machine learning and advanced analytics close to the users and the data. As a result, you can gain real-time insights and deliver immersive experiences at the edge of your network, opening up endless new business opportunities.
The first step in adopting a hybrid strategy is Unified operations and management with Azure Arc. For workloads that run outside of Azure, you can onboard all these resources to Azure, with Azure Arc, including Windows, Linux, SQL Servers and Kubernetes clusters. Once you have done that, you can easily extend management services like Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, Azure Sentinel so you can manage, govern, and secure your hybrid and multicloud environments consistently.
The second step is Building cloud native apps and run Azure services anywhere. More than ever, organizations are building modern applications using Kubernetes containers across cloud, on-premises, and the edge. With Azure Arc, right from the Azure Portal, customers can deploy a common set of Kubernetes configurations to their clusters wherever they are, consistently and at scale. Azure Arc also enables developers to centrally code and deploy cloud-native applications securely to any Kubernetes cluster using GitOps.
The third step is Modernize your data estate with Azure data services. We understand there are going to be times you need aspects of your Azure applications and services to run locally within an environment. Recently announced, Data Services while in preview continues to have a ton of interest with customers already seeing the advantage.
Azure Arc Summary
What’s great with Arc enabled data services is that you get an evergreen SQL that is always up to date. This full automation of updates also applies to Postgres databases running on Azure Arc. You can manage data assets running on-premises alongside those running in Azure familiar tools like Azure Portal, Azure Data Studio, and Azure CLI. You get the automation and elasticity support even for data workloads running in places where you don’t have continuous connection to public clouds or any connection at all.
