Gartner estimates that worldwide public cloud services revenue will total to US$ 314.3 billion in 2019, up 17.5 percent from last year¹.

Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-first strategies, and this is understandable, given that the benefits of the cloud are plenty and hence, hard to ignore. Anytime access to data on the cloud, great agility and flexibility in data management, easy scalability of systems to keep pace with growing requirements and changing computing standards, quick maintenance and support – these are just some of the salient benefits that organizations enjoy when they transition to public cloud platforms.

Recent years have also witnessed substantial growth in the private cloud platform segment. Wikibon projects that the worldwide True Private Cloud (TPC) market will experience a compounded annual growth rate of 29.2 percent². While private cloud does offer all the benefits of public cloud and more, it, unfortunately, comes at a cost with huge investments on hardware technology and lacks the scalability that public cloud offers of utilizing resources on-demand.  Furthermore, organizations lack the bandwidth to onboard and maintain dedicated IT expertise that private cloud computing and maintenance demands. Building a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model on-premise is both expensive and tedious.

In recent years, hybrid cloud computing offers a combination of public and private cloud advantages, allowing companies to host workloads on public and private cloud based on compliance and regulation requirements while leveraging agility and speed. However, it has been observed that there are plenty of large organizations who are unable to reap the full benefits of cloud computing due to stringent privacy, security and regulatory compliance and related governance issues. For instance, financial institutions and research organizations cannot take sensitive data and applications onto public cloud domain due to privacy and data protection issues. There are also latency and connectivity issues that hinder journey to the public cloud. Some other organizations are unwilling to place core functions outside of their corporate data center on external compute and storage assets. For yet others, there are varying customized and non-standard solution requirements that are difficult to support with the existing solutions available and using in-house expertise. However, all of these organizations need to scale and respond to dynamic digital transformation and cloud computing needs. They have a pressing requirement for increased flexibility to keep pace with an agile marketplace.

The paradigm of edge computing on the cloud

The answer lies in intelligent edge on Microsoft’s Azure Stack cloud solution. Sold as an integrated system of software solutions with validated on-premise hardware-in-a-box, Azure Stack provides a great on-premises cloud platform that includes all Azure cloud characteristics and offerings. It is an extension of Azure, offering the same codebase, allowing Microsoft to extend the learning, capabilities and features from Azure public cloud to private cloud.

Azure Stack is a seamless integration of the local enterprise data center and public cloud, enabling companies to capitalize on the benefits of both public and private cloud offerings. 

Azure Stack is a seamless integration of the local enterprise data center and public cloud, enabling companies to capitalize on the benefits of both public and private cloud offerings. Intelligent Edge is an extension of Azure and helps bring to on-premise environments the same cloud applications and advantages, helping companies address privacy and compliance issues. Intelligent edge on Azure Stack integrates several products including Azure IoT Edge, Azure Stack, Azure Sphere, and Azure Data Box Edge. The platform enables consistency, agility, ease of operations and innovation that characterize cloud computing. It helps organizations leverage Azure services with the perfect balance of flexibility and control – an optimal equation for sustained and consistent hybrid cloud deployment.

The salient feature solutions of the Azure Stack are:

• Running cloud-native applications on-premises: Many enterprises are adopting agile application development with microservice architecture.Azure Stack platform supports the development and running of cloud-native applications on-premises. Moreover, the customer can choose many Azure PaaS services, containers, serverless, and the Azure app to complement traditional infrastructure and application architecture that may exist on-premises.
• Technically competitive: Intelligent Edge on Azure Stack enables developers to build new applications using processes and tools consistent with Azure services. They can also develop new cloud applications faster than before by building on application components available on the Azure Marketplace including tools and technologies. Intelligent Edge on Azure also allows for easy collaboration with operations for deployment across locations as best suited to the business, enabling regulatory compliance.

• Competitive pricing: Offering competitive pricing, Azure Stack extends cloud economics to on-premise with a pay-as-you-use pricing model. Companies using Azure Stack bear the cost of ownership of hardware and there are no upfront licensing fees for the solution. Doing away with establishing expensive on-premise IaaS and PaaS services, customers only pay for the services they use with Azure Stack, making this model a financially attractive option for large and small organizations alike.
• Scale of business: Azure Stack allows for scalability in multiple dimensions. Depending on their requirement, customers can scale their solution deployment and access by geographical region, number of units serviced, servers deployed or user access points. All of these make the solution very versatile and attuned to growth. Evolution onto a full-blown Azure Stack is an easy option. On the other hand, organizations that aren’t always connected to Azure can operate in a disconnected mode with different capacity model pricing packages.
• Easy updation and maintenance: Consistency with Azure is easy with regular updates, patches and version control. Azure stack, just like Azure, undergoes regular patches and updates at periodic intervals. Offering excellent automation capabilities, Azure Stack allows for convenient process automation, configuration management and update management.

Closing note

As enterprises step up to the journey of digital transformation, it’s very important for them to understand their current state of application readiness aligning to new business imperatives. This will help them evaluate and maximize their intended business benefits with intelligent edge on Azure stack.

To know how we can help you leverage the best of intelligent edge with Azure Stack, click here.

Reference

1 –https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-04-02-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-g

2 -https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/09/23/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2018/#587005d4507b