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Hybrid and multicloud solutions

Get the consistency and flexibility to innovate anywhere, across on-premises, multicloud and edge environments

Innovation anywhere with Azure

Enable remote work, take advantage of cloud innovation and maximise your existing on-premises investments by relying on an effective hybrid and multicloud approach. Azure provides a holistic, seamless and more secure approach to innovate anywhere across your on-premises, multicloud and edge environments.

Manage, govern and help secure servers, Kubernetes clusters and apps seamlessly across on-premises, multicloud and edge environments from a single place.

Bring always up-to-date Azure services to any infrastructure and benefit from elastic scale, automation, unified management and industry-leading security.

Build and deploy cloud-native apps in your own data centre. Consolidate on-premises virtualised apps on cloud-connected hyper-converged infrastructure with the best price performance.

Bring the compute, storage and intelligence of Azure to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Run machine learning and advanced analytics at the edge to gain real-time insights.

Explore Azure hybrid and multicloud cloud solutions and products

Apps

Build and deploy a consistent app experience everywhere in your hybrid cloud.

Data

Seamlessly migrate, manage and analyse data across your digital estate. Run Azure data services where you need them.

Management

Manage, govern and help secure IT resources across on-premises, multicloud and edge environments from a single control plane.

Security

Get unified hybrid security management and advanced threat protection for all of your workloads across on-premises, Azure and other cloud environments.

Identity

Give users a seamless, SSO experience across cloud, mobile and on-premises apps by managing access with a unified identity platform.

Explore Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)

Networking

Make Azure an extension of your existing network, connecting distributed workloads and locations at a global scale.

Solution architectures

Build multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions through example solution architectures.

Landing zone accelerator for Azure Arc–enabled servers

Get started quickly with Azure Arc-enabled servers with automation built in. This landing zone ensures quality deployments with best practices and implementation guidelines to govern, secure and operate hybrid and multicloud environments.

Use Azure Stack HCI switchless interconnect and lightweight quorum for remote office/branch office

Design infrastructure for highly available virtualised and containerised workloads in remote office/branch office scenarios.

Azure Arc hybrid configuration management

Manage your Windows and Linux machines hosted outside Azure on your corporate network or other cloud service provider, similar to how you manage native Azure virtual machines.

Connect an on-premises network to Azure using a VPN gateway

Extend a network from on-premises or from Azure Stack to an Azure virtual network using a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN). Traffic flows between the on-premises network and Azure through an IPsec VPN tunnel or through the Azure Stack multitenant VPN gateway.

Integrate on-premises Active Directory domains with Azure Active Directory

Use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), a cloud-based multitenant directory and identity service, to provide cloud-based identity authentication.

Hybrid security monitoring using Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel

Monitor the security configuration and telemetry of on-premises and Azure operating system workloads using Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel.

Customers are doing great things with Azure hybrid and multi-cloud solutions

"We've made Microsoft Sentinel our primary source for analytics. Compared with our previous on-premises SIEM, Microsoft Sentinel isn't only fast to set up and seamless to use—it's very scalable."

Piotr Pociecha, Product Owner, ING
ING

"We wanted a smart factory solution that would be scalable and flexible and support more innovation going forward."

Evan Chien, Senior Director of Cloud and Communications Solution, Inventec
Inventec

"By binding our Azure and on-premises environments together through policies and tagging, we can create a consistent way to deploy and manage our systems in a disparate environment. That's really important to us because as we become leaner as an organization, we still need to effectively manage our IT footprint."

Kristina Melo, SQL Server Database Administrator, Ferguson
Ferguson

"There are a couple of reasons why we wanted Azure Arc. In short, speed and innovation. We needed to speed time to market and to quickly establish services and capabilities we didn't have otherwise."

Vinh Tran, Head of Cloud Engineering, RBC
RBC

"With Azure Stack Hub and Azure DevOps, we have more opportunities for automation plus ready-to-use templates for our developers. It's a much faster environment to work in."

Carsten Beckmann, Azure Project Lead, Volkswagen Financial Services
Volkswagen Financial Services

"With Azure Stack Edge Rugged, we've opened up incredible possibilities with AI and cognitive services, helping us deliver more insightful, actionable, real-time video into our customers' workflows."

Marcus Schioler, Vice President of Product Marketing, Haivision
Haivision

Get the latest news and resources on Azure hybrid and multicloud solutions

Frequently asked questions

  • Hybrid cloud computing refers to a computing environment that combines public cloud and on-premises infrastructure, including private cloud, by allowing data and applications to be shared between them. It gives you more deployment options and greater flexibility to scale computing resources and take advantage of cloud innovation, while offering interoperability with your on-premises environment. It’s evolving to include multicloud environments and edge infrastructure.

    Organisations choose a hybrid cloud approach for many reasons, such as meeting regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, maximising on-premises technology investments, addressing low latency and edge workloads, and strengthening resilience and business continuity.

  • Multicloud computing refers to the use of multiple cloud computing services from more than one cloud service provider – including private and public clouds – in a heterogeneous environment. A multicloud strategy provides greater flexibility and mitigates risk. Choose services from different cloud service providers best suited for a specific task, or take advantage of services offered by a particular cloud provider in a specific location.

    Multicloud computing requires understanding different clouds, which can be challenging. A multi-cloud approach also adds operational complexity. Therefore, it’s important to choose a cloud platform such as Azure that embraces a multi-cloud approach and offers product capabilities that help significantly simplify multi-cloud management.

  • Edge computing refers to bringing the computing power of the cloud to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, close to where the data resides, to reduce latency and gain real-time insights. The proliferation of smart sensors and connected devices, combined with advanced cloud technologies such as machine learning and AI, makes edge computing a reality.

    Run virtual machines, containers, and data services at edge locations using edge computing. By moving certain workloads to the edge of the network, devices spend less time communicating with the cloud, react more quickly to local changes, operate reliably even in extended offline periods, and deliver an immersive user experience through highly responsive and contextually aware apps. Read more about innovating from cloud to edge.

  • A successful hybrid and multicloud architecture provides a unified way to manage, secure and govern IT resources across on-premises, multicloud and edge environments. Running hybrid and multi-cloud in a durable way also means enabling consistent database choices and architectures across environments so you can easily move application data where you need it and manage it holistically.

Easily migrate your workloads to Azure

Choose a flexible migration path that supports your hybrid cloud strategy. Build an optimal migration plan using a broad set of tools covering assessment, migration, optimisation and management.

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