Ignite 2023: Making sense of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud

During Ignite 2023, Matt Liebowitz, Global Technology Lead for Multicloud at Dell Technologies and Matt McSpirit, Engineering Technologist and Microsoft Azure MVP, also at Dell Technologies, kicked off a discussion titled, “Best Practices for Successful Azure Hybrid Cloud Rollouts.” The two speakers were joined by Karen London and Kenny Lowe, both subject matter experts in multicloud and Azure Stack HCI.

The terms hybrid and multi cloud still cause confusion in the market, even as IT professionals and vendors alike acknowledge that many workloads still need to ‘live’ on premises. But, McSpirit told the audience, they shouldn’t be treated as islands or silos but rather should be incorporated into the broader Azure strategy.

“That's where Microsoft has been very smart over the last couple of years by bringing Azure Arc to market as a set of services that live in Azure, but extend out to where you need them at the edge and into a colo or core data center,” he said.

“It is all about bringing almost everything under the Azure banner.  Once you've got this Arc-enabled infrastructure at the edge or in the datacenter it is increasingly easy to add Azure services that can “live in those locations on premises, meeting your compliance, regulatory or networking goals,” and eliminating silos, he noted.