Why Microsoft Azure Stack is Becoming More Popular?

Recent the state of cloud report published by Rightscale have uncovered some of the surprising market trends and statistics.

  1. Microsoft Azure public cloud service is gaining popularity among bigger enterprises and Small Medium Businesses (SMBs). Adoption is already increased from 20 to 34% and cutting AWS leads.

    Azure Pack/Stack Growth by 5%
  2. Another major trend noticed in the report is – many organizations are started adopting Microsft Azure Pack/Stack for their private cloud deployments and major percentage (28%) of organizations are either experimenting or planning to use.

    28% respondents are either experimenting or planning to use Azure Pack/Stack

Reasons why Azure Pack/Stack is emerging

As we know, organizations are adopting hybrid cloud which gives companies costreduction  and data privacy benefits. Rightscale reporting suggested that Azure is growing in the cloud market and we may see more growth as well. It is clearly making organizations to go for Azure Stack for implementing hybrid cloud. Why?

There are still few challenges in deploying and managing hybrid cloud.

  • Compliance: Maintenaning and demonstrating compliance can be difficult. Organizations need to check public cloud and private cloud providers are in compliance. Adding to it, organization need to demonstrate compliance. This can happen when critical data (payment card data, healthcare information) is hosted on-primises.
  • Inconsistent application environment: Hosting, operating and processing application and data can be different in public and private. This can lead to poor performance and maintenance cost to organizations/
  • Migration: Migrating data between public and private will not that much easy. Difference in scale can cause complexity in data migrations. Data processing should be fully tested at both cloud deployments.
  • Risk Management: In typical hybrid cloud, applications in private cloud need to interact with public cloud using APIs. For this to happen smoothly network configuration and performance should be up to the mark. Such information exchange through two different environment leads to high security risk involved. Organization must take care of this concern.

Such issues can be unavoidable or need to get fixed if hybrid cloud is implemented using two different vendors. Using Azure for public and private cloud model can significantly eliminate these challenges. Application portability and consistency can be maintained with complete Azure hybrid cloud. Additionally, Microsoft is offering OMS (Operations Management Suite), a SaaS solution for hybrid cloud. It enables admins to monitor and manage both private and public Microsoft cloud deployments.

AWS has dominated the cloud market in past and it still dominating in any report published. But with the hybrid cloud model of cloud computing game is changed. Azure is looking more promising as they are investing into right solutions which is making cloud adoption much easier for organizations.