Microsoft says ‘no one’s even close to what we’re offering’ in a cloud market that Amazon and Google are only just starting to enter (MSFT)

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced two new hybrid cloud services: Azure Stack HCI Solutions and Azure Data Box Edge.
Hybrid cloud lets users run their computing infrastructure across both their own servers and the public cloud.
Microsoft has promoted hybrid cloud for years, while Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud only recently

Microsoft’s just launched two new services that can keep Microsoft in the lead for hybrid cloud — something that Amazon and Google are just starting to roll out.

Hybrid cloud allows users to store their workloads on a mix of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud services. Companies may choose this approach because regulations might require them to keep some of their workloads on data centers — especially in the financial and health care sectors.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced Azure Stack HCI Solutions, which allows customers to install Azure Stack on hyperconverged infrastructure — data center appliances sold by vendors like Dell or HPE that combine compute, storage, and networking gear into a single, software-managed box.

Microsoft also announced Azure Data Box Edge, a new version of its Data Box hardware, which is literally a range of high-capacity storage devices to bring huge amounts of data into the Azure cloud. This one is specifically intended for so-called edge devices, like factory machinery or smart home sensors.

Unlike other cloud vendors that always spoke about hybrid cloud as a "stepping stone for moving to the cloud" — that is, a temporary customer need that would eventually vanish when they moved all the way to the public cloud — Microsoft always saw hybrid cloud as a long-term need, says Julia White, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure.

"Honestly, this is a place where no one’s even close to what we’re offering," White said. "That’s why you see [customers] moving to Azure. We always had this deep understanding of the enterprise and a wonderful legacy and wisdom around how to serve those needs. It’s about continuing to meet those customer needs."

Amazon and Google

Microsoft has been promoting hybrid cloud for years, and since 2017, it has offered the Azure Stack platform, which allows people to use Azure services in their data centers.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services only in November announced AWS Outposts, a hybrid cloud offering that puts an Amazon-branded server appliance in the customer’s data center. In February, Google launched a hybrid cloud tool called Cloud Services Platform into beta. Neither are generally available yet.

"It’s only been really recently since other vendors will even acknowledge that hybrid was a thing," White said. "Previously when you listen to their keynotes, they would talk about hybrid as a transient thing. It wasn’t until recently when they made the move to acknowledge that the world isn’t all moving to the public cloud and customers need flexibility."

Microsoft says more than 95% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft Azure, and its hybrid cloud capabilities are a major reason why, White says.

"We built Azure to enable hybrid capabilities from the very beginning," White told Business Insider.

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