Welcome to Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day—please join us for the digital event. Today, we’re sharing how Azure Arc extends Azure platform capabilities to datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments through an impactful, 90-minute lineup of keynotes, breakouts, and technical sessions available live and on-demand. As part of today’s event, we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Machine Learning for hybrid and multicloud deployments with Azure Arc. Now you can build, train, and deploy your machine learning models right where the data lives, such as your new or existing hardware and IoT devices.

When I talk with customers, one of the things I hear most frequently is how new cloud-based applications drive business forward. And as these new applications are built, they need to take full advantage of the agility, efficiency, and speed of cloud innovation. However, not all applications and infrastructure they run on can physically reside in the cloud. That’s why 93 percent of enterprises are committed to hybrid deployments for their on-premises, multicloud, and edge workloads.¹

With Azure, we meet you where you are, so you can innovate anywhere. The Azure cloud platform helps you bring new solutions to life—to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform so you can build applications and services with the flexibility to run across datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments.

Azure Arc provides a consistent development, operations, and security model for both new and existing applications. Our customers are using it to revolutionize their businesses, whether they’re building on new and existing hardware, virtualization and Kubernetes platforms, IoT devices, or integrated systems.

I’m constantly amazed by the ways people are using Azure and Azure Arc to create innovative solutions, and at the same time, overcome longstanding security and governance challenges.

John Deere brings modern cloud benefits on-premises and at the edge with hybrid data services

The iconic green and yellow John Deere tractors are a familiar sight in fields around the world. With a well-stocked technology portfolio that spans cloud platforms, on-premises datacenters, and edge devices at factories, John Deere’s modernization strategy makes the most of its assets while cultivating a path for the future.

Together with Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance, John Deere helps connect the dots across all these environments and puts the power of the cloud to work in the company’s existing infrastructure. The result? A unified view of operations across platforms that pivots on Azure Arc, helping John Deere to optimize manufacturing operations. Together with Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance, the hybrid solution is helping John Deere drive down operational costs and accelerate innovation.

Another opportunity the cloud provides is to transform data insights into new products and services. For years, Azure has provided machine learning and IoT solutions to unlock signals and data from the physical world. Azure Arc brings data services from Azure, like SQL, PostgreSQL, and Machine Learning so you can harness data insights from edge to cloud with an end-to-end solution from local data collection, compute, storage, and real-time analysis.

We recently announced Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance Business Critical is now generally available. The Business Critical tier of Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance is built for mission-critical workloads requiring the most demanding performance, high availability, and security. Azure Arc–enabled SQL Managed Instance comes from the same evergreen SQL in Azure that is always up to date with no end of support.

Wolverine Worldwide analyzes sensitive data on-premises to optimize the supply chain

Wolverine Worldwide owns beloved activewear and lifestyle brands such as Chaco, Saucony, Merrell, Keds, Sperry, and more. When the pandemic created a new set of unanticipated supply chain challenges across the global economy, Wolverine turned to cloud innovation to help its 13 brands.

“Previously, data was a little tough to get at. It was either a gut feel, or the opportunity bypassed us while we were doing our analysis. With Azure Arc, Wolverine can use Azure Machine Learning and data services to analyze holistically data from the supply chain, manufacturing, and its ecommerce business while keeping sensitive data on-premises.”—Jason Miller, Vice President for Enterprise Data, Planning & Analytics, Wolverine Worldwide

Whether you want to secure and govern servers or create a self-service experience on VMware from Azure, Azure Arc is validated on a variety of infrastructures so you can always get your applications and data to run where you need them.

Businesses can start with Azure Stack HCI support for single-node clusters, which is generally available, for flexibility to deploy Azure Stack HCI in smaller spaces and with lower processing needs. Additionally, we’re announcing today that Windows Admin Center can now manage your Azure Arc–enabled servers and Azure Stack HCI clusters from the Azure Portal. Using this functionality, you can securely manage your servers and clusters from Azure—without needing a VPN, public IP address, or other inbound connectivity to your machine.

Greggs modernizes security and operations

A bakery and coffee shop in the UK with over 2,200 retail locations, Greggs is another customer using Azure Arc–enabled security and management tools. The company needed visibility across its digital estate from on-premises Windows Servers to Kubernetes running in AKS.

“By deploying Azure Arc, we can use Microsoft Defender for Cloud for our on-premises server estate, something we couldn’t do before. We’ve gained significant security benefits—like secure risk score, compliance scoring, and assessments. The central aggregation of logs shows us if a security event actually occurs across multiple devices so that we can pinpoint potential causes.”—Scott Clennell, Head of Infrastructure and Networks, Greggs

For customers like Greggs, we continue to innovate on Azure Arc–enabled servers. We recently announced Azure Arc–enabled servers support for private endpoints, a new servers monitoring workbook created in the public Azure Monitor GitHub repository, and a preview of SSH access to Azure Arc–enabled servers.

With Azure Arc, you have access today to a comprehensive set of Azure services, such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and more to secure and manage resources and data anywhere.

Millennium bcp streamlines multicloud app deployments with Azure Arc

“We needed…the ability to move a workload running in an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to a Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services cluster, or vice versa, in case of emergency. We needed something that could help us turn those into an enterprise-level service. That’s where Azure Arc came in.”—Nuno Guedes, Cloud Compute Lead, Millennium bcp

Millennium bcp is the largest private bank in Portugal and uses Azure Arc for a standard approach to deploy containers to its multicloud environment. Azure Arc helps companies like Millennium build and modernize cloud-native apps on any Kubernetes using familiar developer tools, like Visual Studio Code and GitHub, as well as implement consistent GitOps and policy-driven deployments across environments.

To support our customers’ app development, we recently announced GitOps with Flux v2 in AKS and Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes, general availability of Arc–enabled Open Service Mesh, general availability of Azure Key Vault Secrets Provider extension, and the landing zone accelerator for Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes.

Finally, a huge thank you to our partners and customers in the Azure Arc community. We hope you will enjoy the event and learn how Azure Arc can benefit your organization. We look forward to connecting and listening to your feedback.

Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day highlights

You can access everything on-demand, and check out the additional demos and customer stories in the event portal. Enjoy the event experience. I can’t wait to see how you innovate anywhere.

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¹Hybrid & Multicloud Perceptions Survey, Microsoft.