Hello, I am Julia White and
I'm responsible for Azure Marketing at Microsoft.
In my job, I'm lucky to spend time speaking with the variety of
customers across the globe as well as different roles and industries.
Now one constant whether I'm speaking to an IT pro in America or a
CIO in Germany is that we're all focused on digital
transformation and what that means for us, personally, as well as for
our organizations.
Now in my own career, I have learned new skills, I started first working
on on-premises technology and then, moved to cloud services.
And the knowledge across both, however,
is what's helped me as well as our technology uniquely be able to meet
customers needs as we all shift to the cloud.
Now, countless times when I speak with customers, there's a common
understanding that the industry and their organization is shifting to
a cloud-first model in how they procure and run services.
However, cloud-first does not mean cloud-only.
And the CIOs, partners and IT pros I interact with acknowledge that
the path to the cloud is a hybrid approach for the foreseeable future.
With servers and services running in combination.
And Microsoft believes that a hybrid approach is the path to the cloud
and will help you digitally transform.
In a recent survey over 80% of enterprise decision makers told us
that they see themselves operating in a hybrid environment.
Hybrid cloud is the way all customers can be successful.
So how can you take advantage of this shift in technology?
Now for many, the journey will start with moving existing applications to
the cloud but rarely does this happen overnight.
So in most cases, people will need to manage a couple of environments.
Now, with multiple environments having a strategy to manage and
secure this holistically is critical.
We believe that consistency across the cloud and
on-premises enables you to get the benefits of Hybrid cloud while
minimizing the complexity and the risk.
Consistency means an environment where developers can
use their existing experiences to build applications and services.
Consistency means common management tools that allow you to choose
where the data is located based on your business' needs.
Consistency allows your users to have a single identity across
environments while still protecting corporate data.
All with the same skill sets across both environments.
This means the richness of Hybrid cloud without the cost and
the complexity.
These are just a few examples of the benefits of consistency across your
data center and ours.
Microsoft has developed cloud and
on-premises solutions that deliver consistency.
So here's some examples.
Providing access while still protecting your data is crucial.
So Azure Active Directory extends Active Directory
to allow single sign-on across the cloud and on-premises.
You can enable data analytics and deep learning across on-premises and
cloud with common templates and re-usable language support with Azure
data services and SQL Server 2016.
By developing and
deploying applications in Azure, you also have the flexibility to deploy
the same applications on-premises using Azure Stack.
This can help you meet regulatory or
latency requirements, all with no code changes.
Consistency isn't just a nice to have, consistency is what enables
you to achieve significant business advantages.
I know a great example of this is CarMax.
It's the largest used car online retailer in the United States.
Now in the process of transforming their website and key sales assets,
CarMax decided to re-architect carmax.com.
They quickly established that by running the website in a combination
of cloud and on-premises solutions,
they could best meet their unique business needs.
The site is connected to physical retail locations and
requires a reliable network to deliver a consistent experience.
Now they're also undergoing a number of compliance changes and
operating in a Hybrid environment allows them to stay compliant while
still taking advantage of the cloud benefits.
Now this is just one of many customer examples and
I invite you to visit our site to learn more about how we can help you
on your cloud journey.