For many organizations, retaining their current datacentre environment while shifting some functions to the cloud is the right path for digital transformation. Beyond efficiency and reliability, extending the datacentre to the cloud provides an opportunity to enhance and extend IT offerings. Most organizations begin with small steps: quickly start up VMs on Azure for DevTest, migrate simple workloads, and develop some cloud-aware apps.
Even on-premises workloads can benefit by extending capabilities using Azure services. This might include integrating more robust high-availability and disaster recovery, high-performance cloud storage, and hybrid identity and management capabilities.
Today, let’s take a closer look at some of the ways organizations have used Azure services to extend the capabilities of their existing in-house Windows Server environment.
1. Business continuity and data protection
Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery increase compliance, reduce complexity, and lower costs. They replicate on-premises virtual machines to Azure and orchestrate failover and failback.
Your benefits
While data protection and disaster recovery are crucial, IDC estimates* that as many as half of all businesses are not prepared to recover from a disaster. Companies that used Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup not only met their disaster recovery and data protection needs but also experienced additional business benefits including reduced IT infrastructure costs as a result of paying for only the compute, storage, and network needed in Azure; faster onboarding processes and increased IT efficiency.
2. Manage a diverse hybrid cloud environment
System Centre simplifies deployment, configuration, management, and monitoring of your infrastructure and virtualized datacentre. Use Azure monitoring and analytics to collect, correlate, and search your systems and application data across Azure and on-premises servers.
Your benefits
-
Gain visibility into the health, performance, and utilization of your applications, workloads, and infrastructure
-
Proactively find and fix issues before they impact your users
-
Free up your organization and increase efficiency with automated workflow processes and self-service option
3. Quickly establish dev and test environments
Use Azure Virtual Machines to simplify and speed up the process of running a dev-test environment. Spin up as many virtual machines as you need, network them, and allocate to your developers.
Your benefits
-
Give your developers freedom and speed to develop in Azure, then deploy where needed
-
Create Linux and Windows VMs in seconds
-
Use your own virtual machine image or download a certified pre-configured image
-
Use your preferred coding language natively
4. Extend on-premises file servers to the cloud
With Azure File Sync, you can deliver consistent file share performance for users, whether they work locally or remotely.
Your benefits
-
Leverage Azure as centralized storage for less frequently used file server data while turning your local Windows server into a high-performance cache for frequently used file data.
-
Easy to “lift and shift” applications to the cloud that expect a file share to store file application or user data.
-
Simplify cloud development with containerization capabilities
5. Unite identity and access management across on-premises directory and Azure
Use Azure Active Directory to manage users and secure access to on-premises and cloud information. Extend Active Directory and any other on-premises directory to Azure AD.
Your benefits
-
Enable single sign-on to simplify access to thousands of cloud applications across multiple devices.
-
Protect sensitive data and apps with multi-factor authentication
-
Scale to manage all employee, partner, and customer identities without any degradation of service
6. Archive on-premises data to Azure
Azure Blob Storage stores from hundreds to billions of objects in hot, cool, or archive tiers, depending on how often data access is needed. Use StorSimple to automatically archive inactive primary data from on-premises to the cloud for effortless capacity expansion.
Your benefits
-
Cloud snapshots provide off-site data protection
-
With cloud storage, no secondary datacentre is needed
-
Reduce capacity purchases and infrastructure maintenance
-
Flexible pricing including reserved options to meet your cloud storage needs
How you get started with Azure depends on where your organization is in your cloud evolution. Are you just beginning to investigate what's out there? Or, are you already moving datacentre workloads to the cloud or developing cloud-native applications? Blair Technology Solutions can help you review your current environment, choose the migration strategy that works best for you, and provide you with a fully managed and secured cloud environment so you can modernize your applications with ease.
* https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/azure-site-recovery-and-azure-backup-are-helping-improve-business-operations/
