The Evolution of the Datacenter

When I talk to people about Azure or even the public cloud in general, where possible, I start the conversation by talking about their on-premises deployments and the requirements that drove the existing architecture. For most companies, needs have changed radically over recent years to meet both customer and employee requirements. Employees expect to be able to work anywhere, from anything, using a large number of cloud-based services. Customers are similar, wanting engaging digital experiences across devices that use existing social identities where practical. Organizations are looking to digitally transform and focus on creating only what helps differentiate themselves in the market through accelerated innovation. For organizations, this means more agility and the capability to Elastically scale, potentially globally. Additionally, these drivers often mean getting out of the datacenter business in favor of cloud service utilization, which enables a...