Microsoft set up to help Indian enterprises with advanced hybrid cloud

Microsoft India recently announced the availability of Azure Stack HCI, a new solution that allows customers to adopt a multi-cloud, multi-edge hybrid approach seamlessly.

The solution combines the flexibility, scalability, and price-performance advantages of hyper converged infrastructure with native Azure hybrid capabilities.

Part of the Azure Stack portfolio, it provides organizations seamless access to Microsoft Azure for hybrid cloud scenarios across data centres, remote offices and cloud. Azure Stack HCI solutions will be available from 20 partners offering Microsoft-validated hardware systems.

As organisations rebuild their businesses, an effective multi-cloud, multi-edge hybrid approach will be vital. He explained that this provides much-required agility, efficiency and resilience while staying compliant to regulations around data, said Microsoft India Chief Operating Officer Rajiv Sodhi.

For most large enterprises or highly regulated industries, a hybrid approach makes the most sense, keeping in mind latency, regulations, data sovereignty, or complexity in moving large volumes of legacy data to the cloud.

It also helps organizations to scale existing infrastructure, maximizing value from on-premise investments, seamlessly maintaining business continuity, secure resources, and unlock new business scenarios.

"With our cloud-native approach, we aim to help customers realize higher value HCI through quick deployment and integration...This will enable organizations to be adaptive, agile, efficient, and responsive across locations, optimizing operations and IT cost efficiency in an increasingly remote work environment today," Sodhi said in a virtual briefing.

Intel India Vice President and Managing Director Sales, Marketing and Communications Group, Prakash Mallya said Microsoft is collaborating with Intel on taking Azure Stack HCI to the market. Enterprises are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud models to modernise their infrastructure for flexibility in workload placement without compromising on performance and security.

He added that Intel Select Solutions combine Intel-based hardware with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI to form the basis for simplified, low-cost, hyper converged infrastructure by enabling scalable storage, compute and memory.