A hybrid cloud journey with Azure

Radek Wiankowski & Frank Zomer
Sep 29, 2023 · 3 min read
Azure Stack

While the public cloud has long dominated the IT world, many organizations still rely on on-premises workloads. This dependency is especially relevant for industrial applications where proximity provides desired performance levels or data volume exceeds the network’s capabilities and needs local pre-processing.

For a global logistics and distribution customer with these requirements, we embarked on a hybrid cloud journey. To ensure availability and resilience of mission-critical applications and empower their central Netherlands-based IT team to support all facilities worldwide, we chose Azure Stack HCI as an edge computing offering. Azure Stack HCI builds on the battle-tested Windows Server ecosystem to deliver a hyper-converged infrastructure cluster solution that hosts virtualized workloads and their storage in a hybrid on-premises environment. Complemented by Azure monitoring, backup, security, and compliance services, it is an ideal platform for application modernization and improved productivity.

The environment we created offers mission-critical levels of performance, availability, security, and compliance. Thanks to the standardized hybrid architecture, additional units can be easily deployed across regions and controlled by the centralized team. This case marked the first time that we used a hyper-converged appliance managed by cloudnative services and deployed such a solution for a customer with global presence. Here’s to hybridity!

Frank Zomer and Radek Wiankowski