Microsoft said that its Azure Hybrid Benefit solution for Linux customers is now available in India. The solution helps businesses migrate to on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure.
Also Microsoft claimed that it enables a significant reduction in the cost of running workloads on the cloud by converting existing PAYG (pay-as-you-go) virtual machines (VMs) to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing.
According to the statement, in the new normal, it is challenging for businesses to adjust their strategies to maintain productive operations and processes. Businesses face challenges in migrating workload to the public cloud due to regulatory and data sovereignty-related issues. This is common in highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare and government. Further, some workloads, especially those related to the edge, require low latency.
Many organisations have significant on-premises investments that they want to maximise, so they choose to modernise on-location data centres and traditional apps. This includes on-premises licenses and subscriptions, and the inability to migrate them to the cloud often affects the ROI and total cost of ownership. Azure solves this by acknowledging this investment and not charging for subscriptions or licenses again when customers move to the cloud, said the company.
Microsoft Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps businesses remove migration friction, save software subscription costs at scale, and reduce redeployment and reboot time. Globally, over 1,500 Linux virtual machines were migrated during the preview period to Azure using the new Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities, enabling significant cost reduction for enterprise running Linux workloads in Azure.
Using Azure Hybrid Benefit businesses can achieve the lowest cost of ownership by combining reservations savings and extended security updates. By adopting Microsoft Azure for their cloud journeys, businesses can meet their on-the-cloud requirements, build new expertise, and successfully achieve more business value. Organisations can also effectively plan their cloud roadmap by optimising Azure environment as per their workload for scale, security, governance, networking and identity, said the company.
Businesses get co-located technical support from Azure, Red Hat, and SUSE with just one ticket. The solution combined with recently announced Red Hat and SUSE support for Azure shares disks to lift-and-shift failover clusters and parallel file systems—like Global File System.
It is fully compatible with Azure Arc, providing end-to-end hybrid cloud operations management for Windows, RHEL and SLES servers in one solution.
