Do you have legacy systems
that don't have a path to the cloud?
How about regulations that
make you keep data on premises?
Join Jeff Woolsey and myself
as we discuss the best ways
to improve your IT processes
for on premises and the cloud
so you can have a modern
adaptive IT environment.
Just a while back
I was talking with an IT director
and they felt that even though
they'd done a great job
of giving employees choice
to work from home or the office
their rush to support
work-from-home scenarios
left them with some
outdated IT processes.
We talked about some quick
steps they could take
to improve their IT
management and governance
to make things more
adaptive and flexible
simple yet impactful.
So today we're going to
explore some of that advice.
So you have tips and
guidance you can use
regardless of industry
or size of business.
Before we get into this segment
of Inside Azure for IT
remember this episode
is in three segments.
If you want to see how
to empower the workforce
check out my conversation
with Tara Roth
CVP of M365
Customer Success Engineering.
And if you want to learn
how to better collaborate
with developers, I had a great
chat with Scott Hanselman.
Now back to the segment.
Joining me is someone who
needs no introduction
but I will, Jeff Woolsey.
Jeff, welcome
to Inside Azure for IT.
- Thanks Erin.
It's so great to be here with you.
It feels like old times again
working together on Windows Server.
- Oh, the good times
the good times.
Jeff, I know you share my passion
for constantly providing
IT and the organization
with the tools to support
them where they wanna go.
Whether a small company
or a massive enterprise
with data centers
everyone wants to manage digital
estates in a consistent way.
As you mentioned
we worked together
on Windows Server for years
and the number one question
we got was
how do I manage a distributed
environment at scale?
- Oh, yes, this is a challenge I've
heard for almost two decades now.
Our users deploy Windows Server
in distributed environments.
Sometimes it's
multiple data centers
branch offices, retail locations
or combination of all
of these mashed together.
Now in these environments users
would add management solutions like
System Center, OpenView, Tivoli
or create or aggregate
their own tools.
With these solutions
users end up seeing
only a fraction of their
total estate and then have to
deal with the complexity
of life cycle management.
It's expensive, complicated
and worse, incomplete.
It's time for an easier, better way
to deliver consistent management
for distributed environments
at scale with the cloud.
Now admittedly
this is kind of a mind shift
for a lot of folks
and I wanna reach out
to IT professionals and
system administrators out there.
Millions of you
have made your career
learning Windows Server
and systems management
in the past 20 years.
For the next 20 years
you really need to
learn Arc and Hybrid.
Hybrid administration is critical
for your resume and career.
Now Erin, you may be shocked
to hear me say this
but we are saying that we need
to shift our center of gravity.
It's no longer on-prem
it's the cloud.
- Jeff, I'm not shocked at all.
Having made the move
to the cloud myself
it makes complete sense.
In the traditional way
that's still near and dear
to so many on-premises folks
the center of gravity
is your corporate domain
and data center
but everything is routed through
your on-premise data center
and you have a physical
operations perimeter.
And when you do that
it adds hosting costs
it adds latency
and that slows down
the overall user experience.
- Exactly. You want to take
advantage of the best of both
by creating an environment
where the center of gravity
is a hybrid cloud model
not on-prem.
We're seeing users creating
adaptive IT environments
that span on-prem
multi-cloud and Edge.
Personally, I see this in
several vertical markets
like healthcare, finance,
manufacturing, and retail.
- Jeff, what I love about this
it's not an either/or.
We're not asking people to get rid
of their on premises investments
or just lift and shift everything
to the cloud.
We're simply suggesting a shift
in that point of view.
- Exactly, and the way you
can do that in IT
is by using the best tools
from the cloud
and bringing that down
into on-premises workloads
servers, VMs, other clouds
containers, and Edge devices.
This way, you have
a common set of tooling to
make management of both your cloud
and on-premises
infrastructure the same.
You have one consistent set
of management for all resources
regardless of where they reside.
- Okay, let's go deeper.
Let's talk about enabling
cloud native capabilities.
If, say, that bank was on premises
or even just use a
different cloud provider.
- Yes, it starts with Azure Arc.
Azure Arc makes all your
on-prem servers show up
in the Azure control plane.
Now, for folks that are new
to Azure Arc, this isn't migration.
Your servers are still
running on premises.
We're making a representation
of those in the Azure control plane
so you can see Azure VMs
and Azure Arc-enabled servers
side-by-side.
- So where today, IT can take
System Center, HP OpenView
and aggregate on premises data
to build that custom dashboard
to see what's going on
across the organization.
But now we're just giving it
directly to the IT pro.
And by Arc enabling
all your servers whether
it's Windows or Linux or SQL
Arc will show all your resources
running everywhere, and so you can
then set and use
consistent policies and security
and governance, consistent
update services, data services
like all of these.
For example, if you Arc enable
all the servers and data
you have running in Azure
AWS in your data center
and in branch offices
you can use Azure Defender
to get a security view
of all those workloads.
Azure Arc gives you that
standardized control plane.
Now on-premises servers
still have needs
that IT has to address
like if you need to RDP
into a server to troubleshoot
or do certificate management
or performance monitoring.
- Now you're speaking
my language here.
So keep in mind, there's always
a time and place to do this
and we're making it
easier than ever.
So for example, if you need
to manage servers directly
which, spoiler alert
everybody does.
we've taken our customers'
favorite server management tool
Windows Admin Center
and now we've embedded it
into the Azure portal.
So you can do things like
browse event logs
directly in the server
enable firewall settings
do web-based registry edits
enable roles and features,
all from Windows Admin Center.
- I just love this.
I remember, Jeff, it was only
a few years ago when we started the
development of Windows Admin Center
and we dreamed
of having stuff like this
and now that I'm in Azure
we've brought these together.
And when I talk to customers
and tell them about this
I don't have to tell them
it's years from now
you can go and do all of this
right now in the Azure portal.
Now let's take all of this
and bring it into a real
life scenario.
When I talk to customers
they wanna implement this
but it can get difficult
when they get bogged down
with internal processes
and politics.
And so where do you see
IT getting tripped up?
- Oh yes, definitely.
We have all been there.
So there's a couple of
points of advice here.
First, please don't get
bogged down in a pilot.
I see this happen way too often.
You can't make a business case
for something if
you tried it out on a
couple servers, one or two servers.
That's just not enough.
To convince the CTO
you need more than just
such a small sample size.
This stuff needs to be done
at the heart of
your IT environment.
The real power of this
is doing it at scale.
The power jumps when you're at
100, 200, thousands of servers
and doing it all in a single place.
Now second, build your operations
perimeter around
the entire IT estate.
That means hybrid, multi-cloud
and Edge, not just
your on-prem environments.
You can take advantage of
Azure Security Services
for a unified IT estate.
Now lastly, you need
to collaborate.
Get developers engaged
to create an IT estate
that works this way.
Work with your data scientists
developers, and security
professionals as you set up
your modern operations
because modern ops requires
collaboration and Azure is
a great place to collaborate
because of the unified
nature of the platform.
It's literally what Azure
was built for.
- Jeff. I see it every day
when customers make that leap
from pilot to production
amazing things can happen
in the environment.
And to your point on collaboration
you really teed up the
conversation around DevOps
which is the topic Scott Hanselman
and I talk about
in the next segment.
We're gonna show you how
to remove barriers
between IT and developers.
And we'll make sure to link
the episode here in the video.
So be sure to check it out.
So I can't believe
how fast this is going, Jeff.
We're on to our last topic.
I often get the question
from customers.
I need a solution to run
my current apps, my existing apps
new cloud apps, like what's
a great way to do that?
I have all of these.
And so let's talk about the options
when you need to pool on-premises
and cloud resources to deploy
either Linux or Windows VMs.
- Yeah, I'm really glad
we're covering this.
And that's exactly why
we built Azure Stack HCI.
It's hyper-converged infrastructure
delivered as an Azure service
with Azure Arc built-in.
You simply register your
Azure Stack HCI with Azure.
There's no agents
there's no scripts.
There's no, none of that mess.
It's just all included.
It's all integrated.
It appears in Azure as a resource.
So you can manage it, monitor
secure and assign policy
consistently, just like
any resource in Azure.
And the built-in integration
with Azure Arc automates
log collection, governance
and policy.
Again, imagine being able to
deploy policy consistently
from on-prem all the way down
to all of your Azure stacks
residing anywhere, at planetary
scale, and with performance
optimized for HCI workloads
and built-in AI acceleration.
Third generation Intel Xeon
scalable processors provide
the compute foundation
for Azure Stack HCI
with built-in security.
In fact, ESG recently did a study
measuring the improvements
of Azure Stack HCI
with the new third generation
Intel Xeon scalable processors
and I highly encourage you
to go check it out.
These are just some of
the great results that you
can bring into your
organization today.
Now HCI allows you to run
your existing Windows
your Linux VMs, but it also means
you can deploy AKS on
Azure Stack HCI so that you
can deploy those same containers
that you're deploying to AKS
and new cloud apps on premises
on Azure Stack HCI.
And this allows you to deploy
Azure services on premises
like Arc-enabled SQL data services
Postgres SQL, AI, ML, app services
and so much more.
- Wow, so if you need help
in branch or remote offices
with VDI at scale, or even
your transactional processing
Azure Stack HCI is
really the way to go.
- Yep.
- Jeff, I just can't thank you
enough for coming on the show
to tell us about the shift
that IT teams are going through
and how to create a more
adaptive environment, regardless of
where the resources are located.
Ultimately, Microsoft has
an end-to-end integrated portfolio
for people, processes
and investment.
Be sure to check out
the other segments of this episode
of Inside Azure for IT
with Tara Roth and Scott Hanselman
for more.
And for all our videos
deep dives and skilling content
head to azure.com/insideazureforit.
Thank you for joining us today
and I'll see you next time.