Agility is vital to modern business and Microsoft Azure helps organizations deliver solutions in record time with flexible infrastructure and world-class tools. It is a reality that businesses must fully leverage existing resources and infrastructure, while adopting the latest technology for efficiency and scale. You can thus clearly foresee that hybrid solutions, that blend cloud and on-premises resources, are going to be critical to drive productivity gains during the next decade.

In May, we introduced a new capability of our Azure BizTalk Services suite: Hybrid Connections. Hybrid Connections are a turnkey connectivity solution that allow your Azure Web Sites and Mobile Services to securely connect directly to on-premises databases and services – without the need to open your firewall to incoming traffic or deploy a VPN gateway.

We’re already seeing customers rapidly prototyping with and deploying hybrid solutions using Hybrid Connections, and a few interesting patterns are emerging:

• Lift-and-Shift: with Hybrid Connections you can take an existing on-premises web workload and re-deploy it to Azure Web Sites. Hybrid Connections ensures that the site can still securely reach your on-premises database and service dependencies – all without having to change a single line of code!
• Dev-Test: businesses are taking advantage of Azure’s flexible infrastructure to rapidly develop and test new solutions. With Hybrid Connections you can easily connect these to your on-premises data and services without having to meddle with the network perimeter. Once ready, you can deploy your solution where it makes best sense for the enterprise – on the public or a private cloud or on managed servers.
• Mobile apps: the BYOD and ubiquitous mobility revolution partners naturally with cloud technology. Platforms like Mobile Services strengthen this coupling by offering enterprises even faster development times for custom mobile backends. However, businesses still want to leverage on-premises resources in these solutions, and now with Hybrid Connections that’s not just possible, it’s easy.

Hybrid Connections are a game changer for organizations that are looking to be more lean, more agile and deliver value faster. Of course, security will continue to be a paramount concern which is why we’ve provided comprehensive management tools so enterprises can extend their safeguards to hybrid solutions. This includes Group Policy support for Enterprise IT to centrally control access to assets that Hybrid Connections can reach.

This isn’t your father’s hybrid cloud – it’s an entirely new way of building hybrid solutions in record time.

Join Nir Mashkowski and Josh Twist in this one off special of ‘Not Your Father’s’ that demonstrates just how easy it now is to securely solve your hybrid challenges.