Businesses that still want to roll their own infrastructure in the age of the cloud have a new option from Dell EMC that lets them tap into Microsoft Azure when it makes sense.
The creatively titled Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack will be available in the second half of the year, Dell announced Thursday. It allows Dell customers to buy servers with preloaded software that lets them standardize on Azure as their cloud provider while still keeping workloads on their own machines.
MIcrosoft has been arguably the most aggressive of the big cloud vendors when it comes to pushing the benefits of a hybrid cloud approach, although they all offer something along these lines. While there’s a solid argument to be made that cloud vendors are way better at managing infrastructure than most businesses, a lot of IT organizations don’t want to throw away investments they’ve made in older technologies that work well enough. And legal requirements force some to run apps and store data behind their own systems.
A hybrid approach allows for the best of both worlds (theoretically, anyway), particularly for companies that see sudden unpredictable spikes in demand for their services. And it’s a big bet for Dell EMC, which would be in trouble if the huge market for enterprise technology shifted wholesale to the public cloud overnight.
