Microsoft has launched a brand new service in a bid to help customers switch to its Azure Cloud service as effortlessly and painlessly as possible. The company has always been a proponent of the Hybrid Cloud approach pioneered by Azure and today, it is giving enterprises an opportunity to experience the same on a first hand basis with a minimum of hassle.
The Hybrid cloud approach, as the name implies, is an approach that sees the public cloud while still running some of their applications in their own data centers. The approach allows companies to run applications on their own environments should they chose to and also allows them to keep the stuff they don’t want to part with, on their own data centers.
Microsoft has also launched a new Cloud Migration Assessment service. As the name implies, this service can allow companies to scan their existing IT infrastructure for an estimate of what it would cost them to move their services to the Azure platform.
Microsoft has also announced some extra perks for existing Windows server users. For instance, moving their Windows Server licenses to Azure for existing users can save them up to 40 percent. This can turn into a very attractive deal for the larger enterprises.
Finally, the Azure site recovery tool is also getting a teeny weeny update. This particular update has to do with disaster recovery plans in case enterprises are hit with some sort of trouble and find themselves in need of a quick refresh. Interestingly, disaster recovery is not all that much different from data transfer and the same tool can also be utilized for data migration. Microsoft is also slated to add support for a couple of features that will make tagging virtual machines in the Azure portal easier in the coming weeks.
