>> Stay tuned for today's episode of the Azure Enablement Show.
We were talking about hybrid and multi-cloud adoption.
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Welcome to the Azure Enablement Show.
In this show, we're having
technical conversations with Microsoft experts about
the questions or obstacles you
might face on your cloud adoption journey.
Now, in previous episodes,
we focused on the Cloud Adoption Framework and how it can
help accelerate your cloud adoption journey.
Today, we're focusing in on Hybrid and multi-Cloud.
To talk to me today is Pratibha.
Pratibha, welcome to the show.
>> Thank you, Sarah. Happy to be back here with you.
>> Awesome. Now, Hybrid and multi-Cloud
is a journey that a lot of organizations are taking,
but what is that journey,
and why are they actually undertaking it?
>> Hybrid and multi-Cloud,
really honest, today, it's a norm for most of our customers.
With a push to accelerate digital transformation,
customers have really expanded
their technology investments. Think of it.
They have hundreds and thousands of VMs apps
running on their On-prem data centers,
they have apps on the Edge infrastructure,
they have different branch offices running OEM hardware.
They have investments in the Cloud as well, but now,
even in the Cloud, there is
diversity with more than one Cloud providers.
Hybrid and multi-Cloud, the notion is really to connect up
that diverse On-prem infrastructure that customers
have with the diverse infrastructure that they have in the Cloud.
The second part of your question as to why are
our customers thinking about the Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach.
It's really because they're faced with a few realities today.
I'll give you few scenarios that we often hear from
customers and why they have adopted this approach.
One, many of our customers are in highly regulated industries,
say, FSI, financial institutions or healthcare.
They have these data sovereignty requirements,
where they need to keep the data on
their On-prem physical infrastructure vs the public Cloud.
When you have such requirements where you're
restricted to keep your data On-prem,
you still want to continue into waiting in the Cloud,
and that's where Hybrid really becomes a compelling option.
There are other situations where customers have invested
a lot in their On-prem datacenters,
and they just don't want to do away with it, but rather,
add additional value to those
On-prem datacenters by leveraging the Cloud,
by bringing some of those Cloud services On-prem,
and that's, again, where Hybrid really makes sense.
There are other scenarios,
such as latency issues,
where customers want to reduce the latency by moving
the workloads closer to the IoT devices.
That's, again, another situation
where Hybrid really comes in useful.
When it comes to multi-Cloud approaches,
customers really need the freedom to choose
their Cloud providers and have that flexibility they need to.
It also makes sense for implementing strategies,
such as business continuity or disaster recovery,
where customers would typically
duplicate their workloads across different Cloud platforms.
That's when the multi-Cloud approach really makes sense.
Those are some examples where we've seen why
customers are embracing Hybrid and multi-Cloud.
>> Now, it seems to me that if our customers are used to
having all their workloads and infrastructure in one place,
actually, starting to distribute it to other Cloud providers
and several locations may actually bring up some challenges.
Is that fair to say?
>> I mean, there's definitely complexity here.
I wouldn't say challenges,
but what really happens with this approach
is there are new needs that the customers have,
and as you can see on the visual,
I have a slide here to call out
the three main customer needs when it comes to Hybrid.
Number 1, they really need to have visibility into
the health of the resources that are now
spread across all these different Hybrid endpoints,
if you will; On-prem,
Edge, and the multiple Clouds.
There needs to be the central visibility over
the state of all these resources through a single pane of glass.
Second, we have seen a lot of our customers
have already established their governance policies On-prem,
and they'd really like to extend that and
integrate that with their Cloud infrastructure so that
they have consistent governance and
compliance across the board no matter
where their resources are placed.
The third piece that we've seen is there's
so many different app development teams
with different programming languages,
different dev platforms and development practices out there,
and there is a need to bring in consistency in
operability to unify those development practices.
Those are really three main needs that we've seen surface
when customers are embracing the Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach.
Really, it boils down to a balance.
On one hand, you want to leverage,
want to accelerate innovation with
Hybrid and multi-Cloud, but on the other hand,
you want to ensure that you have the effective,
unified operations to make
sure there is standard compliant governance across the board.
>> Now, you used the phrase there, unified operations,
which I've heard a few people mention,
but I'm not entirely sure what it means.
Could you explain it to us, please?
>> Yeah. I'd say,
whenever we talk about Hybrid and multi-Cloud,
we have to talk about unified operations
because unified operations really addresses some of
those needs that I called out earlier in the earlier question.
Unified operations is really the approach
of centrally governing and managing your resources,
whether they are On-prem, on the Edge,
or on Cloud platforms,
the multiple Cloud platforms that you may have.
Having that central control and
visibility is what that concept is all about.
In the case of Azure,
we have Azure Arc.
As you can see on the slide here that I'm bringing up now,
just give me one moment,
Azure Arc really brings that capability of
being the single control plane to manage,
to govern, manage, and operate
your resources no matter where they live,
no matter what they are.
You could be having Windows servers, Linux servers.
You could be having Kubernetes clusters or
database services residing anywhere and
you could centrally manage that through
Azure Arc as if they were living on Azure.
That makes it really simple.
That really implements division
of unified operations that I just talked about.
>> We talked in previous episodes about how
great in the Cloud Adoption Framework is.
Does it actually support this Hybrid
and multi-Cloud approach for our customers?
>> Absolutely. As you mentioned just now,
Sarah, in the earlier episodes,
we have talked about how
the Cloud Adoption Framework documentation
guides the customer's Cloud journey,
all the way from defining a strategy to your plan,
to preparing your Cloud environments,
to eventually migrating or innovating in the Cloud,
and then governing and managing.
We have documentation and
resources as part of the framework to guide that.
What we've now done and what we are now announcing is
specific content for
the Hybrid and multi-Cloud adoption scenarios.
Think of it as a layer on top of the Cloud adoption framework,
wherein we've included specific guidance for
this scenario and the guidance across these different stages,
as you can see in this CAF slide here.
These are the additional considerations
that customers have to take into
account as they go about the journey through
the phases as defined in the Cloud Adoption Framework.
>> Now if a customer is implementing
a Hybrid or a multi-Cloud strategy,
what business decisions do they need to think about?
>> Yeah. I'm going to use the same slide here to walk you
through some of those additional considerations,
additional decisions that our customers need to make when
they're thinking about implementing
the Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach.
Starting with that business question that you had, Sarah.
In the business phase, in
the defined strategy phase where customers are thinking
about their business outcomes
that they want to achieve out of their Cloud adoption efforts,
they will have to evaluate if the Hybrid and
multi-Cloud approach can help them accelerate their strategy,
can help them achieve their business outcomes.
If you think about the earlier example
that I mentioned at the beginning,
customers that are in highly regulated industries
when they are restricted and they have to
keep their data On-prem and not on any public Cloud,
in that case, how do you accelerate innovation
if those customers want to leverage the Cloud?
That's when the Hybrid connectivity and
the Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach really makes sense.
This consideration for Hybrid and
multi-Cloud scenario has to come in at the right stage,
which is in the define your business strategy phase.
This is what we expand upon in
the new content that we're releasing as part of the framework.
Similarly, the plan phase,
which is also a part of that business domain of Cloud adoption.
When you're thinking about your plan,
the Cloud Adoption Framework guides
you to say that you've got to take
rationalization decisions to figure
out that whatever workloads you have,
whatever assets you have,
are you going to re-host them into the Cloud?
Are you going to rebuild them or re-architect them?
Those are few of the rationalization options.
But now with the Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach,
those rationalization options have just exploded.
There are so many different pathways that you could consider,
you could move something from public Cloud onto On-prem.
You could move something from On-prem to the Edge.
You could re-host stuff between two Cloud providers.
The permutation and combinations are just many.
The guidance that we have in the plan phase for the scenario talks
about these different combinations and
what best practices you should be
considering as you define
your plan for Hybrid and multi-Cloud Adoption.
>> That's essentially good. When you're
building a Cloud environment,
you need some components like networking and
storage and identity and a whole host of other things.
How does that change when you're going
down this Hybrid Cloud journey?
>> I'd say this is the critical part of
that whole journey that our customers are on,
preparing their Cloud environments.
There are certain configuration changes that will need to
be made depending on your Cloud mix.
What do I mean by that? I have a slide
here that elaborates on this.
Let me just switch here.
If you see the visual on the slide,
there are three different scenarios,
and think of those as three different customer situations.
Now, in the first one on the left-hand side,
the customer may be having, as you can tell,
they're having a lot of investment On-prem,
some on multi-Cloud, and some on Azure, and some on Edge.
But overall, it's a very small Cloud footprint.
What could this customer do?
With Azure Arc, they could build that central visibility into
all those Cloud resources that they
have so that they have that again,
the centralized unified operations.
At the same time,
that would also set the stage for
accelerating more Cloud adoption where they could
start pushing out stuff from On-prem to
Azure or to any other Cloud that they wish to use.
In the case of the Azure first model that we have in the middle,
most of the investments are in Azure and so
connecting with the networking isn't
going to be a lot of challenge for this customer.
Azure has native tools to extend the network onto Edge,
onto On-prem, or to the other Cloud providers.
They could really focus on Cloud-native innovation in this case.
The third scenario where
this customer has a lot of investments in multiple Clouds,
there's some complexity here,
but at the bare minimum,
the need to think about having that minimum operations baseline
and connect up the different Cloud platforms
that they're using in their multi-Cloud environment.
Overall, when customers go
through this phase of grading their Cloud environment,
they have to make key decisions
depending on what's their Cloud mix,
what's their prominent Cloud mix.
Decisions on identity.
Which Cloud provider is going to be their main identity provider?
Which Cloud provider is going to be
the main destination for backup and recovery?
Is there required connectivity between
the different Cloud platforms and how do you make that happen?
Those are the kind of guidance and
content that we've put together as part
of the new scenario that is
included in the Cloud Adoption Framework now.
>> Thinking about governance and management because that's
key and important regardless of where your workloads are hosted,
if we dial in the Hybrid and multi-Cloud story,
what does governance and management look like?
>> For governance and management,
it really goes back to the earlier question we had around
unified operations and that's
what we really enable with Azure Arc.
What we're doing is expanding the Cloud governance capability that
already exists onto all these other end points
for Hybrid and multi-Cloud,
be it On-prem, Edge,
or the other Cloud platforms.
Arc in conjunction with
native governance tools say Azure Policy or Azure Blueprint,
really extends that Azure management capability
to any resource no matter where they live.
What this means to the customer is really that unified,
standardized governance and compliance
that they've all been asking for.
>> Awesome. Beyond the Cloud Adoption Framework,
is there any place that our customers can go to for
additional best practices or
guidance for this Hybrid and multi-Cloud journey?
>> Yeah. What we've done with
this new content, as I mentioned earlier,
Sarah, with the Hybrid and multi-Cloud adoption scenario,
we are bringing in content,
which is not just
limited to the guidance that we have in [inaudible] ,
but all the additional resources that any customer
might need to realize their Hybrid and multi-Cloud approach.
On the left-hand side of this visual,
that's the Cloud Adoption Framework,
which is all about guiding your Cloud journey across the people,
process and technology elements with
the Cloud Adoption Framework guidance.
In addition now, we are bringing in content from Microsoft Learn.
All the course materials that you may need to scale up on Hybrid,
we're bringing it together as part of this content.
Reference architecture, specific to
Hybrid are also being included.
Then well-architected content from the well-architected framework
is also added as part of
the scenario content that we're releasing.
Similarly, best practices in
feature product documentation is also going
to be part of the new Hybrid and
multi-Cloud adoption scenario in Cloud Adoption Framework.
The link that you see right at the bottom,
that is the one link that
I would ask our audience today to remember.
That is where this new Hybrid and
multi-Cloud adoption guidance is available.
Do check it out and let us know if there's any feedback.
>> Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Pratibha.
It's always good to talk to you.
Thank you to all our viewers today and please stay
tuned for future episodes of the Azure Enablement show.
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