Microsoft Azure Stack is a suite of hardware and software that provides Azure public cloud services to an organization’s localized data center for the construction of a hybrid cloud.
Azure Stack provides solutions of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) to organizations involved in application development and deployment. Azure Stack shares the code, APIs, and management portal with Microsoft Azure to present a single system to tackle hybrid cloud problems like getting in sync between the cloud and local environments.
Types of Microsoft Azure Stack
Currently, three kinds of Azure Stack are there that suit a variety of business requirements:
Azure Stack Edge is a solution for edge computing that includes a computation hardware appliance for artificial intelligence and machine learning for the Internet of Things.
Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliance with Azure capabilities within the data center for data center transformation, demanding workloads, and distant branch environments.
Azure Stack Hub brings the Azure private cloud option to help organizations use cloud services on premises for supporting application modernization and sporadic access to the cloud.
How is Azure Stack Beneficial?
Azure Stack has several benefits that comprehensively make it highly suitable for organizations that seek to modernize their infrastructure and adopt the hybrid cloud solution. Here are a few of the advantages:
Hybrid cloud infrastructure: Provides a smooth interface between the traditional-based infrastructure and cloud services; this ensures that sensitive information within an organization is protected while still enjoying the advantage of cloud capabilities.
More flexibility: Provides teams with the ability to adjust the amount of resources required depending on the current needs of work and immediately adapt when the situation changes.
Edge computing capabilities: Adapt data closer to the source, thereby minimizing latency and enhancing edge application performance.
Cost management: Enables organizations to leverage existing investments to control expenditure and an operational leasing cost structure, empowering them to grow into their cloud solutions.
Azure service integration: Take integration with other Azure services that are helping to make life easy. Other Azure services include Azure Backup, Azure Monitor, Azure Security Center, and others.
Security enhancement: Has enhanced features such as isolated virtual computers, encrypted networks, and a Security Center to enhance an organization’s security and protection of data as well as meet legal requirements.
Performance improvement: Brings in components like Storage Spaces Direct and Software-Defined Networking to offer speed to the traditional and cloud worlds.
Use Cases for Microsoft Azure Stack
Azure Stack tries to do all those things that require an organization to invest in a private cloud. Such as widespread application development in the next generation needs cloud-like services and flexibility. Using private cloud bases on Azure provides developers with an effective environment in which applications can be created, tested, and modified. The company can centrally deploy the apps to either the Azure public cloud or onto on-premises facilities via Azure Stack.
Microsoft Azure Stack provides use cases in a variety of industry verticals:
- The industrial and manufacturing sectors can use Azure Stack to connect to real equipment and systems of the manufacturing environment to obtain metrics from the industrial environment and utilize this intelligence to minimize manufacturing or operating expenses.
- By leveraging Azure Stack, the sector of financial services can solve data sovereignty and regulatory compliance needs, transform the aging legacy workloads to the cloud, and prepare the organization for the full cloud migration.
- The healthcare sector will benefit from Azure Stack to consolidate patient data collection, update legacy healthcare applications, or even develop all-new patient applications, and harness analytics to drive operational decisions in the clinical setting, such as patient turnover time.
- By employing Azure Stack, the government sector can update and optimize aged applications, generate unique new solutions and applications for the voters, and follow the local legal requirements.
- Similar edge computing and processing can be utilized by the retail sector for a retail floor and then employ the gained intelligence for increasing the product availability and reducing theft and fraud possibilities.
This uniform development and universal deployment feature of Azure Stack aids a company in meeting its regulatory or compliance needs. However, not all applications are capable of running in the cloud. Azure Stack enables certain applications to run locally towards issues with connection, security, and delay within the public cloud.
The workload that is created for the hybrid cloud is capable of working locally, remotely, and in the public cloud depending on the requirements of regulation and policies with a complete shift in the code base. Controlled workloads are most often associated with banking, financial and reporting services, and exchange trading activities.
An application that resides on Azure Stack can gather and process research data before being handed to a workload in the Azure cloud for further data processing and more extensive analytics.
