Introduction and business growth
For the last couple of years, Microsoft has been talking up Azure as the future of both application development and business applications, with everything from Exchange to SharePoint to SQL built for the cloud first, with the server versions showing up six or nine months later.
Those on-premise versions aren’t going away – the 2016 wave of server products is just coming out, and SharePoint chief Jeff Teper has been reassuring customers since 2013 that Microsoft could carry on creating server versions of products, while noting that the best experience would be on Office 365.
Stacking them up
Azure Stack may be the way Microsoft squares that circle – the new version of Dynamics AX is available now as a cloud service and will be on Azure Stack after it ships at the end of this year as well, which might mean we’ll see more Microsoft cloud services go the same way.
Azure Stack is a big part of how Microsoft is offering hybrid cloud, which Mike Schutz, the general manager of Microsoft’s enterprise cloud team, says is what businesses want for cloud and data. The fear of cloud is largely gone, he says.
Schutz notes: “Customers have moved from ‘why cloud?’ to deploying cloud. Those businesses that were sceptical about whether cloud even made sense for them? They are now really actively looking at how they should be using cloud, and coming up with their own cloud strategies, whether that be at the infrastructure layer, building new applications or consuming SaaS services. For the enterprise customers that we work with, that’s where hybrid cloud comes in.”
Cost considerations
It’s not that hybrid cloud is better than public cloud; it’s always going to cost you more to build and run your own cloud system. He points out that “startups who don’t have existing, legacy infrastructure investments are just adopting public cloud in full force”. But most businesses already have IT systems that they’re using.
“Enterprises have to balance the investments they have, with getting all the benefits public cloud brings. They want the agility public cloud brings, being able to spin up new applications into virtual machines, new databases in just a few clicks and minutes, instead of procuring servers and deploying all the software they would have to do in the past.
“They want that agility, as well as the cost savings they’re able to get. But they also have to figure out how do they make that intertwine and operate with their existing infrastructure and app investment, so hybrid has become the way that we think and that most of our customers are now beginning to think is how they’re going to approach the cloud.”
Enabling business growth
Schutz points out an Avanade study where 74% of enterprises believe that ‘hybrid cloud will enable business growth’ as well as IDC’s prediction that more than 80% of enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud architecture by the time 2017 arrives.
In fact, he says: “Many of them are already taking their first steps, are already using hybrid cloud using some of our technology. We continue to invest in making that on-ramp to public cloud very easy for them while still continuing to make their investments in their on-premise infrastructure more efficient and less costly.
“We’re very focused on creating a set of capabilities that help organisations embrace this new world of hybrid cloud, from the concrete and the metal of the hardware, all the way up to the app services.”
Key parts of the strategy
Hybrid cloud strategy
The existing Cloud Platform System, the upcoming Azure Stack release and the Operations Management Suite (OMS) cloud service are the key pieces of Microsoft’s hybrid cloud strategy, alongside hybrid options in products like StorSimple and the new SQL Server 2016 release.
“We’re bringing Azure to customers’ data centres,” says Schutz, although that means the parts of Azure that make sense, rather than the entire Azure service. “Our strategy is to help customers deploy an Azure-consistent cloud in their own environment and deliver that to their users as services.”
Storage and backup is an obvious place to start with hybrid cloud, because every business is handling more data these days, whether it’s videos, virtual machines, customer information or data from IoT sensors, and it’s growing faster than the price of drives is dropping.
“Because of this phenomenon of data doubling every couple of years, the cost of storage in our customers’ environments is increasing dramatically. We’re working to make our public cloud Azure storage a seamless extension of our customers’ storage infrastructure today. Can we help organisations reduce the cost of that storage and get more value from it by using the cloud, and – once it’s up in the cloud – do more with that data like rich analytics?”
Azure StorSimple
One option is the Azure StorSimple appliance – which can be a hardware iSCSI SSD SAN, or a virtual appliance that tiers older data up to Azure. Schutz compares it to automatic cloud backup of smartphones: “As consumers we take it for granted that our phones are always connected to the cloud and if I take a picture, in the background that picture is going to get copied to the cloud. If I lose my phone, I’m not going to lose all of the files, the settings, the contacts, or those pictures. If I get a new phone it just sucks them down from the cloud.
“You can almost think of StorSimple in the same way where I’ve got on-premises storage, I get the benefit of high-performance SSD storage, lots of IOPS, but as that data ages, it goes up to the cloud for archival and backup.”
OMS also includes backup and disaster recovery. “It’s democratising the DR capabilities that traditionally were reserved for the top-end of applications before, because of the expense. Thinking about how you can use the cloud as a customer’s failover site, you can have backup and DR for a lot of applications that have gone unprotected, or were protected with really expensive DR systems.
“We think the cloud can fundamentally change that model, help reduce costs and expand the footprint of the number of applications and VMs they protect in their environment.”
And as businesses build and buy new applications, they can use hybrid cloud for data. “Developers can write apps that span public and private cloud,” says Schulz. “They can build apps that are consistent with a huge portfolio of apps that rely on SQL Server today in the existing traditional environment.
“We have SQL Azure database as a highly consistent public cloud offering. And we have these new capabilities in SQL Server 2016 for a stretch database, where tables and rows can be tiered up to the cloud as that table grows over time.”
Managing other services
Realistically, Microsoft isn’t assuming that Azure will be the only public cloud customers will have. If you’re using different cloud services, you can manage those with OMS, Schutz says. “Organisations can manage any application and any instance across clouds, not just Microsoft clouds – not just Azure or Microsoft private clouds but reaching into VMware environments and AWS environments and OpenStack environments to really give a holistic view of their IT operations and get great analytics and information from that.
“The concept of seamlessly extending what our customers have on-premises as well as helping them manage across clouds, that’s really the focus of our hybrid offering.”
Accepting that hybrid cloud doesn’t just mean Azure and Azure Stack, or just Windows Server either, gives Microsoft an advantage over other hybrid cloud systems, which assume businesses will shift everything to any single system – whether that’s OpenStack or Cloud Foundry or anything else – and makes it an option for businesses that are using public clouds other than Azure.
Source: techradar.com
