Making your hybrid strategy a reality with Azure services

With businesses discovering the benefits of hosting applications & services on a scalable, flexible & efficient platform, the past few years have seen significant growth in cloud adoption. If you look at the data, 94% of enterprises are already using the cloud. However, this rapid adoption of the cloud doesn’t mean moving to the cloud is easy, especially when your legacy infrastructure applications and services form a part of your organization’s enterprise IT environment. You need an all-inclusive cloud migration strategy irrespective of whether you are migrating on-premises services & applications to the cloud, or integrating your systems with the cloud services.

Challenges like which applications should be moved to the cloud, in what order should they be moved, or how your on-premises environment will communicate with your newly commissioned cloud environment cannot be ignored. The solution to all such migration challenges, however, is building a hybrid cloud environment. Before we discuss how it is, let us brush up on our knowledge of a hybrid cloud environment.

What is a Hybrid Cloud?

A hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud with one or more public cloud services in which communication between each distinct service is enabled through the proprietary software. Businesses often opt for a hybrid cloud environment for solving the issues that occurred due to the integration of multiple environments. Several application communication issues take place during cloud migration. Hybrid clouds resolve these issues by creating a networking platform and facilitating on-premises networks with a seamless extension. Moreover, the flexibility a hybrid cloud provides to a modern organization makes it even more sought-after. Though many cloud service providers offer hybrid cloud services, those offered by Microsoft Azure are believed to be more unique and mature.

How Microsoft Azure Services Make Your Hybrid Cloud Strategy a Reality?

If we talk about hybrid cloud solution deployment and management, a unique advantage is associated with Microsoft Azure. We all know how a huge number of organizations run on-premises infrastructures that are powered by Microsoft. So, realizing the scalability and performance benefits of a public cloud by extending the on-premises environment becomes easy for them. Some of the services offered by Azure for building hybrid cloud architectures include:

Site-to-Site VPN networking

ExpressRoute

Public API interfaces

How to Build Azure Hybrid Cloud with the Help of Its Infrastructure Services?

You can extend your on-premises IT infrastructure into Azure through a Site-to-Site VPN or ExpressRoute solution. You can commission virtual machines on Azure and can get benefitted from the Infrastructure as a Service offering of Azure as these VMs can communicate seamlessly with on-premises infrastructure, applications, and services.

Given below are the steps for creating a hybrid cloud with the help of a Site-to-Site VPN or ExpressRoute:

Get these services commissioned through the Azure Portal

After the commissioning is complete, your on-premises perimeter service endpoints need to be configured with the necessary security, routing, and networking pattern.

After the Azure VPN or ExpressRoute Gateway is successfully connected to the on-premises endpoint, the Azure virtual network becomes the extension of the on-premise physical networking infrastructure allowing the two networks to seamlessly send traffic to each other

Once the extended hybrid network is in place, Azure virtual machines can be commissioned for communicating with your local network services without making any additional configuration

How to Build Azure Hybrid Cloud with the Help of an Interconnected Services Model?

Through a hybrid cloud, your on-premises environment is extended into the public cloud, and that the entire environment can be managed as a single entity. This is why, we often consider hybrid clouds as infrastructure-related solutions, however, they are not all about infrastructure only. A hybrid cloud solution also comprises all those online services that can seamlessly communicate with your on-premises environment. This is made possible by Azure with the help of public APIs that are available for most of its services and solutions.

You get a lot of flexibility when it comes to building an application in a hybrid cloud environment. You can create various unique solutions by commissioning on-premises services and complementing those with Azure offerings. For example, a logic layer could be built and hosted on-premises, the data could be hosted in an Azure SQL database and then Azure Cognitive Services can be consumed for giving AI capability to your application. This is just one example, there are a plethora of such possibilities. So, you should take a hybrid cloud solution as a combination of on-premises, private & public cloud services, and should not limit it to the constricted infrastructure definition which is prevalent today.

Complete Integration through Microsoft Azure Stack

Hybrid cloud environments must be seamlessly integrated. Microsoft completely understands this and so has created Azure Stack to solve this purpose. Azure Stack, which is one of the latest services in the cloud, is an extension of Azure created for running hybrid applications on-premises with efficiency and consistency. Through it, connectivity and latency requirements can be addressed. You could process the data locally in Azure Stack on-premises and aggregate it in Azure for more analytics while common application logic could be shared across both platforms. Not just that, legacy applications can be updated and extended with modern Azure services on-premises to utilize the hybrid solution building model we discussed above.

The Hybrid Cloud Model: How Azure Helps You Build a Holistic One!

The hybrid cloud model is certainly one of the most sought-after innovations in the cloud. Through it, you can leverage the power of both an on-premises and cloud environment concurrently and operate your business effectively even in a dynamic environment. Moreover, Azure and Azure Stack by Microsoft facilitates your business with all the resources, tools, and services it needs for building solutions that are scalable, cost-effective, and efficient. Moreover, you can deploy workloads to any environment easily through enterprise integration & automated orchestration. In short, it helps you mine the essential business value from the hybrid cloud architecture you have.

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