Customer-Hosted Azure Offerings Reduce Barriers

• Several offerings enable Azure technologies to be used in customer-hosted scenarios ranging from large-scale server and storage down to microcontroller units.
• The offerings could allow customers to benefit from Azure technologies when Microsoft-hosted Azure is infeasible for reasons such as compliance, security, and connectivity.
• The offerings overlap, several are nascent, and the overall strategy is still being worked out.

Microsoft has offered many products and services that enable customers to run Azure-compatible technologies locally so that solutions or portions of solutions need not be deployed on the company’s public multitenant cloud. (See the chart “Customer-Hosted Azure Offerings.”)

Self-Hosting Reduces Barriers of Public Cloud

Certain customers have been unable to deploy solutions on public cloud platforms as they have emerged over the past decade because of barriers blocking a transition from traditional on-premises environments. These barriers include the following: