Blog Post

Azure Infrastructure Blog
6 MIN READ

Drive growth by accelerating customer adoption of Azure infrastructure

omarkmsft's avatar
omarkmsft
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jul 19, 2022

As we emerge from pandemic trends and customers continue to accelerate their digital transformation, we see ample growth potential ahead. Cloud technology is expanding access to innovation beyond the IT department, and migration and modernization of core infrastructure, virtual desktop environments, mission-critical workloads, and IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) modernization on the edge are fueling massive public cloud and edge opportunities.

 

This week at Microsoft Inspire, we’ll focus on how accelerating adoption of cloud infrastructure can help customers take advantage of these new opportunities and drive growth for our partners. We want partners to maximize their return on this opportunity by leveraging Microsoft end-to-end—across our pre-sales and post-sales programs, effective co-selling with Microsoft sellers, and our extensive partner incentives portfolio that anchors on driving net-new Azure consumption growth. Our 650+ Advanced Specialization partners are already doing this and seeing exponential growth as a result. Be sure to attend our session to learn more.

 

Migrate and modernize your infrastructure and mission-critical workloads

While migration of on-premises workloads for enterprise customers continues to be high priority, our ambition is to expand from being the trusted public cloud for enterprises, to becoming the trusted, ubiquitous computing platform from cloud to edge for all organizations and all workloads. To take advantage of this opportunity customers and partners can leverage the unique value available only on Microsoft Azure.

 

  • Windows Server and SQL Server run best on Azure, and customers trust the Microsoft cloud when it comes to running business-critical workloads such as SAP. It’s up to 80% less expensive to run Windows Server and SQL Server VMs on Azure than our main competitor.
  • Azure is the most cost-flexible migration and modernization destination for Red Hat and SUSE-based Linux distributions in the cloud.
  • VMware customers can use familiar skills to migrate or extend on-premises workloads to Azure VMware Solution, now available in 23 regions around the globe, more than any other cloud provider.
  • For regulated industries, Azure has 60+ regions for data residency and 100+ compliance offerings—more than any cloud provider.
  • Azure lets customers adopt the cloud on their terms with the most comprehensive hybrid, multicloud, and edge solutions with a complete cloud-to-edge approach that addresses both customer needs across IT and OT.
  • We are the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms recognized for our comprehensive set of services, flexible deployment options from cloud to edge, strong baked-in security, and a global partner ecosystem trained on Azure IoT for industrial customers.  
  • Azure has the best HPC solutions that customers can use today. We are the only hyperscaler to ever make the top 10 in supercomputer ranking.

This week, we are announcing new Azure capabilities and product updates to help partners increase return on investments, grow leads, and shorten sales cycles:

 

  • The Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty: Designed to meet heightened requirements for data residency, privacy, access control, and operational compliance in the cloud and hybrid environments. Learn more here.
  • Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP): More than 500 partners are currently participating in the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, assisting thousands of customers. We want every migration and modernization project to be led and delivered by our partners so we can accelerate the cloud journey and drive additional modernization and optimization opportunities. We are improving the partner experience by making significant investments and updates to AMMP to drive scale and faster velocity. We are providing richer incentives—including for must-win Windows Server and SQL Server migration—and introducing a new partner nomination experience with more agile and simplified approvals and payouts. We’re empowering Microsoft sales organizations to locally allocate incentives for their areas, providing more opportunity for partners to engage and feed into local plans. And finally, we continue to update best practice guidance through our Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and the Azure Well Architected Framework.
  • Azure Migrate: We're excited to announce that you'll be able to use integrated, at-scale application modernization of ASP.NET applications to Azure App Service, and we’re also working to bring in TCO guidance to help customers understand the business case for migration, all in one tool.  
  • Azure Center for SAP solutions: Now in preview, is an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage SAP workloads on Azure, enabling customers and partners to create and run an SAP system as a unified workload, and providing a more seamless foundation for innovation on the Microsoft Cloud. Learn more here.
  • Azure Confidential Computing: Azure already protects customer data in transit and at rest. Now, with Azure confidential computingwe help protect customers’ data while in use. Today we’re announcing the general availability of confidential Virtual Machines based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors with SEV-SNP technology. Also now generally available is Azure confidential ledger—a managed and decentralized ledger for data entries, building on our open source blockchain-based framework and confidential computing infrastructure. Learn more here.
  • End of support for SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012/2012 R2: This month, end of support is coming for SQL Server 2012, and in October 2023 end of extended support is coming for Windows Server 2012. Because winning these workloads is crucial, we’re now investing significantly more to support your largest Windows Server and SQL Server migration and modernization projects—up to 2.5 times larger based on project eligibility through the Azure Migration and Modernization Program. For partners, it’s a good time to make sure any customers using SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2 are aware of end of support and take action to stay secure. It’s also an opportunity to talk with them about their cloud migration and modernization plans. Learn more here. 
  • New Azure VM series featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor: These new VMs are engineered to efficiently run scale out cloud-native workloads like web and application services, modern data analytics platforms, and open-source distributed systems. If you’re building Linux applications in Azure today, you can request access to the preview.
  • Virtual Machine (VM) restore points: Now generally available.,tCustomers and Azure partners who are looking to build business continuity and disaster recovery solutions can use VM restore points to capture app and crash consistent backups natively on Azure.his can then be used to restore disks and VMs during scenarios such as data loss, data corruption or disaster recovery. Learn more here.
  • Premium SSD v2 public preview: Recently announced, this is the next generation Azure Premium SSD Disk Storage. With Premium SSD v2, customers can provision separately the IOPS, throughput, and disk storage capacity they need and scale performance more cost-effectively when deploying transaction-intensive workloads.

Innovate anywhere with cloud services

With the convergence of IT and OT happening in the industry today, and customers are telling us they want to use cloud services and practices everywhere—across their on-premises, public cloud, IT and OT edge, and even with next-gen technologies such as 5G. Bringing together Azure Arc, IoT, and 5G—including private and public multi-access edge (MEC)—creates great opportunities to differentiate ourselves and enable our customers from anywhere. Only Azure has a comprehensive solution portfolio across IT and OT that can meet customer needs from cloud to the farthest edge. We are seeing some great momentum here with partners like yourselves helping customers meet real world needs with Azure Arc. Today we are announcing:

 

  • The Azure Arc Boost Program: In partnership with Intel, this new program will drive the deployments of Azure Arc that include Arc-enabled services and Arc-enabled infrastructure, such as Azure Stack HCI through our Systems Integrator partner ecosystem. Learn more here.
  • New features in public preview for Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI: This includes Azure Marketplace integration, Arc-enabled guest VMs with extensions, Remote Support for Arc-enabled Azure Stack HCI, and more which will be available soon. Learn more here.

This week at Microsoft Inspire 

Microsoft Inspire is a great place to hear more about these opportunities, and it’s an even better place to hear from partners about how they’re growing their business through the Microsoft Cloud and Azure. Tune into the keynote and check out the Azure sessions below to get started.

 

Azure sessions  

Published Jul 19, 2022
Version 1.0
Microsoft Ignite 2021
No CommentsBe the first to comment