Guest contributor |
Enterprises today have a complex mixture of applications and data on the cloud, on-premises and at the edge. Whilst Microsoft Azure is the ideal place to develop, host and scale many apps, not all workloads are well-suited for the cloud.
Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI bring many of the benefits of Azure to workloads running at the edge and on-premises. They extend the Azure control place and Azure services to wherever workloads are running, adapting the cloud to customer needs.
There are various situations where a hybrid cloud solution would be beneficial. For example, some operations must be able to continue locally, even in the case of wide-area network failures or other interruptions, which is a common scenario in manufacturing and healthcare industries. Similarly, some workloads depend on low latency to meet performance requirements in cases where the users are in a remote location with poor connectivity or are far from an Azure data centre.
These situations can be addressed with traditional private clouds or edge computing, but they can be difficult to manage at scale. They often involve different tools and techniques than cloud native management on Azure, creating fragmentation and increasing costs.
A hybrid cloud platform allows organisations to be flexible whilst keeping their data where they need it.
For example, hybrid environments are managed through the Azure Portal using Arc, which centralises administration alongside other Azure workloads, bringing consistency across hybrid workloads and improving efficiency for operations staff. In addition, developers writing apps will find many of the same container and data services they are used to on Azure, increasing productivity.
Furthermore, hybrid workloads can continue running even if connectivity to Azure is lost temporarily, providing an ideal combination of consistent central management and local reliability.
Another distinct advantage of Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach is the broad partner ecosystem that brings many different validated hardware configurations to Azure Stack HCI. Partners bring a variety of creative edge devices, traditional data centres and other configurations.
Kyndryl, for instance, has extensive experience designing, building and managing hybrid cloud environments for demanding mission-critical apps around the globe. By building on that experience and our strategic partnerships, Kyndryl is positioned to bring the Microsoft adaptive cloud to our customers’ enterprises.
Stanley Wood is distinguished engineer and vice president of the Kyndryl Microsoft alliance at Kyndryl
This article was originally published in the Summer 2024 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.