 Hey, I'm here with Dave Kurt, Program Marketing Manager in the Azure team, and we are going to talk about the different dimensions when it comes to Hybrid and he will talk about what you need to think of when you think about Hybrid Cloud. Hey Dave, how are you doing? Hey Thomas, I'm doing great. What about you? Doing fantastic. I always have the opportunity to talk to you and other great people. I always do very well. Speaking of that, I know that many people probably know you already because you do videos, you're doing blogs and a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to hybrid topics. But what does a product marketing manager do and what is your job and your background? That's a good question. What do I do all day? No, seriously, let's start with the easier one, background. I joined Microsoft in 2012 back home in Switzerland where our original come from. I held different roles. The last role in Switzerland was leading the Azure business for Switzerland before I relocated in 2018 to Corp. Here at Corp or as you know, you work for Microsoft too, it's interesting. A lot of us have the same job title, but what we're doing can differ widely. But as a product marketing manager in my particular case and many that work with engineering is we're working very closely with engineering on the products, what's the go-to-market strategies, what's the messaging, what's the value of the product or a solution that we deliver to our customers. Because of that, we do have the chance to talk quite a lot to customers, but also with engineering which is a very nice interface between the awesome things the engineering teams build and then see actually how our customers use that technology to transform their businesses. Now that is awesome and I know that in your job role and we have talked a lot in the past, you obviously have a first of all, a very good understanding of what are the customer needs, but also very much like the market trends and see what is actually coming in the future. So you're probably always a little bit ahead of me what you see what is coming. So speaking of all that, you obviously were working especially a lot with hybrid and the hybrid teams, all the product teams or feature teams which do hybrid services, I think for example like Azure Stack Teams, Azure Arc, all these teams, you worked with them. So in this session, we're going to talk about hybrid in general and you brought some very nice topics. So what are we going to talk about in this session? So in the beginning, we talk a little bit the difference in understanding or definition of hybrid Cloud and how that can differ actually quite widely. Then we're going to talk specifically about, I call them the five dimensions of hybrid Cloud or let's say the core scenario, which I believe if you want to be successful in the long-term with a hybrid strategy that you should consider before you start evaluating, let's say the product itself. Okay, that sounds awesome. I think when you came up with that proposal for this session, I was like, oh, yeah, that is definitely exciting because sometimes you don't even start thinking about it. You just heard like, let's do hybrid and then you just start with a service and that's it, right? But so I'm definitely looking forward to that. Now, speaking of hybrid, before we actually go into this, why do we do this? Like why actually do we think that hybrid is a big deal and what do we see there? Why is the whole effort? So I love the question as a very good question. So when we talk about why hybrid and as you can see on the graphic that Thomas just put up, it's the customers' environments are growing increasingly more complex. And that has a lot of reason. When you think about a lot of companies out there in the world, they grew very, very quickly, right? And then they purchased merchant acquisition, they grew their business that way, and then all of a sudden they found themselves, oh my goodness, we're about this company, we have to integrate them into our environment, et cetera, et cetera. And so what was interesting is when we ask customer what hybrid means to them, and just for all you listeners, if you come up with what you or how do you define hybrid, I promise you it's going to be very different than to other viewers. And so what I mean by that is in service, we have people that said, oh hybrid is my environment plus the hoster or my environment plus this company that we bought and we integrated those two systems and we have application that go across these environments. And depending on which analysts you talk to, Gartner, Foresters, there's many out there, they kind of like different define that. So there is some that say integration hybrid versus true hybrid, integration being the bread and butter of any company, they know how to integrate two systems. And so with that, it's extremely important that as a company like Microsoft, we take a step into that complexity because as you can see, there's customers that have hundreds to thousands of applications. They have a super diverse infrastructure, often they don't even just have server hardware from one OEM, but multiple OEMs. So that means they have sometimes different management tools to upgrade those firmwares and things like that. So it's spreads everywhere. If we add IoT and Edge because you know, smart buildings are now even during COVID where some companies use cameras to measure heat and other things, it even adds to that complexity. And then we have the whole cloud topic and cloud as we know, a lot of people say they have a multi-cloud strategy. I find often out when you dig deeper, it much more happened that for example, a department bought a different cloud provided than the other department versus having a clear written down strategy going forward. And so that's why because of that complexity and to in our case of Microsoft, empower every person in the organization to achieve more, it's super important that we realize this complexity and say, you know what, we're going to take a step into this to help you in your journey to achieve more. Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely great. I mean, I see those challenges a lot, right? And I always try to feel like, how does the IT department of a company feel? And when I look at this slide, it's like, okay, these are all the challenges they're actually dealing with. When you look at the first part, you said like managing hundreds, if not thousands of different applications. And the challenge there is not just like, they're all the same type of applications. Some of them are very modern applications written on modern languages. They're like losing pass services, even server less or are containerized. And on the other hand, they have all these traditional applications in VMs or even on physical machines. And they need to manage all of that and work with all of them. And the same thing as you mentioned about infrastructure and also multi-cloud, it is really challenging. And so like happy that we support our customers and also obviously support them wherever they are, depending on what their actual needs are and probably where they have invested in the last couple of years. Yeah, and then so another important layer to that is definitely also then, while a lot of companies are moving their workloads to the cloud, there are applications that stay behind for a variety of reasons. It's like you said, it could be something on a physical machine where it's like the golden rule, never touch a running system. And it just shows the menu of the container and some monitors in the office building or it's just not worth spending time on it. It could be because there's still a mainframe in place but it also can be that it's regulatory requirements, external regulatory or internal, just the company policy says you have to keep it on-premises or latency that you literally have a technical requirement where you want decisions to be reached immediately and not first travel to the next big cloud data center and back before the decision is made. This becomes I think the most evidently when people think of something like self-driving car, if your car would have to rely on the cellphone signal, which in Switzerland is quite good, but just in general, and then it pings back and says, yeah, you actually want to turn left there. It might be too late if you're going to get 100 kilometers per hour on the highway. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now, I like this and I like what we're saying and I think that I really like that hybrid is like part of the Azure DNA, if you will. It's like not just something we basically just created a couple of months ago, but really had into our different services from the very early stages of Azure. If not, like even before that, I would say with our products and services and software we brought to our customers. And I love to have another program manager in a video a couple of days ago, and he basically said, look, there are obviously customers they want to use Azure, but for some reason, as you just explained, they can't. So let's just bring Azure to them and give them the opportunity to run Azure wherever they need it. And yeah, before we dive in a little bit into the hybrid strategy of Azure, like you said, it's in our DNA. So that's why we made these jackets. You probably can't read it. It says hybrid by design. And it's true, but here's the funny thing that happened to me. So working in Azure, we're very focused on Azure. And we did once a research where we interviewed some of the larger customers about what was, and one of the question wasn't that the research was, what was your first hybrid cloud workload? And everybody but one said Office 365. And it was like, we're so focused on Azure. And what you just said, Microsoft is hybrid by design. It goes way beyond just the Azure brand when you think about from Dynamics on-premises to Dynamics 365, if you think about exchange SharePoint, online exchange, online SharePoint with Microsoft 365 suite. So this is not a particular like, oh yeah, this Azure team came up with Microsoft and figured, oh, we got to do something in hybrid. No, it's like, it's core DNA. We grew with many enterprises on the data center side and then extended that to the cloud. And that's why I think we're very uniquely positioned to really understand that on-premise complexity in world because we've been in it for quite some time and then grew out to the cloud, which we're now in it for a while too, but there's definitely been some good learnings along the way. Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to highlight, I mean, that is like something a lot of people think when we talk obviously in the cloud, it doesn't mean that, and I always quote Jason Sanders on that. He basically said, look, we know that not everyone will have, will move everything to the cloud, right? It will not like, hybrid will be an end state for many, many customers. So they will run workloads on-prem. They will run workloads in the cloud. They will use the cloud to make their on-prem infrastructure even better. And so I love what we are doing here. So when we talk about from it now, just the Azure head, not the Microsoft head, so just from the Azure, what are the core four areas where Azure is investing in it? So one thing on top, you see the single control plane with Azure Arc being highlighted there. And that is really taking that step into that complexity which is covered and saying, how can we help you to get a view to drive governance and management across anything? And that means you're multi-cloud places. It means for your on-premises, you're your hoster that you use just everywhere. How can we bring you that unique view all together into the Azure portal so you have one single control plane to take care of everything? Another thing that you just mentioned, Thomas, is about how can we bring services to you because there are companies that want to use Azure services. They want to use past service to modernize how they're doing business or how they built your application. So how can we bring that to you, to any infrastructure? And not to sound overly marketingy, but I think it's a super true place here because as you see the next point, it's modernized data center revester stack. And what I like to highlight here is, again, if we go back to what Satya's marching orders are or vision for Microsoft is about empowering every person in an organization. He literally means every person in an organization. He doesn't say every person in an organization who exclusively uses Microsoft, meaning if you just bought a big purchase order of hardware at anybody and it's not Azure stack, it's just you bought hardware as you usually do. We're not telling you all to use the Azure service you have to buy my hardware. I say, oh, I completely understand my mission is still to empower you. And so here is an individual past service that you can run on that infrastructure. Let's say you use a different cloud than Azure and you have a team, a business IT team that has some resources there. They're using SQL servers. So they installed Windows servers, SQL server on top of it or a Linux server. And now to drive governance and everything you're patching the Windows OS, you're gonna patch the SQL server, et cetera. Thanks to Azure Arc, you could actually say, you know what, I understand you decided to use that cloud. I'm not gonna force you to change that. But what I would want you is, for example, to use a Azure Arc data service like SQL DBMI that brings that past service to it. So you have those advanced security features and compliance tools at your disposal while for them nothing changes. They use SQL and they're using the cloud platform of their choice. And then the fourth area is how do we enable that with to the whole edge? And you see Azure IoT highlighted there. And Thomas, you mentioned it, not every workload is gonna live in the cloud and that's gonna be true specifically when we think of edge scenarios, right? If that is a point of sales system at McDonald's or the check-in at the airport, there's gonna be some compute happening right there. You may wanna be able that if your internet connectivity were to crash that it stays operational, right? While you still aggregate data that you actually put up to the cloud, it could also be that you don't put all data up, but patterns of data, right? Let's say a country has certain privacy rules and you wouldn't be allowed to put my face that you scanned at the airport and scan it up but send it to the cloud. Maybe your country has a problem with that, but you could still record the patterns, for example, how I moved around in the store where it doesn't have PII where it just shows hey, the maturity of people come in, go left and see actually those casing of whatever you have there. And you know, that's my most valuable spot because the maturity of foot traffic goes there so you can charge your supplier some money to put their product there or however you wanna use it. I'm just saying there's a lot of these scenarios where not everything is gonna move up. And then as even I noticed in the US, I don't have the same internet connectivity speed and options like you have in Switzerland, I got quite jealous when you told me you have a gig up and down. I wished I have 35 up and that's about it. But yeah, choking aside. So when we think of Azure, those are four distinctive area. There are different products behind it but that's what we wanna enable customers. We wanna enable them to leverage existing infrastructure or other clouds and still bring them those Azure services they like. We try to help them with if they wanna modernize hardware, consolidate the data centers, whatever that is, branch offices or edge hardware, we got them, we got their back, we're having something to help them. And as well, the whole extension with IoT and then on top of it, that single control plane. And if we for a second look at Microsoft then you would say even Intune is in the Azure portal which helps you with your device and end points. IoT Hop is there where all your millions of sensors can connect to. So Azure really can become that single control plane if you will for your whole environment regardless of where the resources are located physically. Yeah, no, absolutely. I love what we're doing here. So three things I wanna quickly like repeat what you just said. Well, first thing I wanna clarify, it's not just one gig up and down. Like I have a 10 gig connectivity now just wanna clarify that. Thank you, I'm depressed. Secondly, as you mentioned, and I think that is very clear, like we don't have one, like just one single product that does hybrid, right? We see that customers have different needs and different challenges. And so that is why we have different solutions who can do hybrid and can actually can address that. And sometimes you need some of them like two, two or three together. Sometimes you just need one. Sometimes you can't bring maybe all of them. But really it depends on what you're doing. And the first thing I think you mentioned, or one of the first things, which I really liked, it's also, it's not that we creating these dependencies, right? We do not say, hey, you need to use our full stack and fades and like making that work. No, no, no. We actually kind of like have these layers where we offer you, you can have our cloud inspired infrastructure using our Azure Stack portfolio. But there's no need to actually do that for running, for example, something like an Azure Arc service like Azure Arc enabled data services or something like that. So that I really like that we actually decouple these things and we have a lot of customers that say, hey, but actually I wanna run everything from you and that is also great because we have the solutions for that. And so, yeah, no, thank you very much for clarifying that, that helps a lot. And that's actually the segue into the next topic of the five dimensions. Because if you're watching this and you might think, oh my goodness, that sounds complicated. They have many products as an example. I would say it all depends on how you define product. I could argue and say, I have one product, it's Azure. And Azure has many services and these services do certain things that help you achieve a certain outcome or a goal. And so while we hear a lot of these buzzwords of other cloud providers that recently got more investments into this hybrid reality, where it's like all about, oh, cloud provider A, this is their hybrid product or cloud provider B, that's their hybrid product. And that I think is a big difference of what you just mentioned if a platform by design is hybrid or if you have a product. Yeah, yeah. I think there is like really where we differentiate but let's talk very quickly about the five dimensions. I'm gonna write them just very quickly down. So it's basically, and then we see we're gonna discuss, I'm gonna bring one example from a consumer side because it seems like some people like that. So let me try to draw here five boxes. So it seems like this one I screwed up. So let's see is somewhat equal sizes. So in case my handwriting here is not as nice, just know that they're equally important. It's the five dimension is not, one is more important than the others. Now, when we talk about the core again of hybrid and let me move this very slightly here so everybody can see it better, then everything you do hybrid is meaning is at a minimum two different things coming together for the same outcome, right? And everything any application workload or let's say any workload we take, you have a app layer, you have like codes that runs a program, software, whatever. You also have the data layer. You have a networking or communication layer. So let me use communication here. You have identity, you have security and management. And so what I mean like when we talked about that hybrid thing and I say it's two things coming together. The very simple example I can do is my smartwatch and my smartphone. It's not one that has cell phone enablement but even if you have this one with cell phone enablement it kind of like to get the full value out of it. It needs to be coupled with that is the way it's not the same value. I still can use it disconnected if you will. It's not the same level. So what I mean when I say those five dimensions there are apps on this watch that run Strava to record my workout or whatever app I do. There is a data layer because it allows me to store music or audio books that I can stream while exercising where I don't need the other ones. So it has some form of database on it, right? It has data. It has communication. It talks with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. If you have the one with a SIM card it also talks to cell phone services. And it has some form of identity. It knows it's me. I have a code to tip in when I wear it with the phone close by it knows me. And there's a security and management control plane in here. It's a smartphone who tells me there's an update. It's a smartphone where you can say automatically install updates. It's a smartphone where I can say deploy this app on my smartphone and on my smartwatch. And so that's why whatever it is could be exchange server, right? We could take that. You have exchange here. You have exchange over there. It has data. It has an identity component. There's like a connectivity. And so when I say before you just jump in on any specific product I would really sit down and say, okay, what's the workload I'm moving? And then the solution I need what do I get from the app side? Right? That could be app services. And we just talked about we can bring you services to any hardware or whatever. But it's also let's change the color here. It's like let's say visual studio. Visual studio. There is a visual studio online on this side. There is a visual studio desktop on this side, right? There is for the application layer there's runtime services that we have on both sides. We would have GitHub on both sides, team foundation server. There is a DevOps here. There is a DevOps on this side. So if your application developer Microsoft really provides you the tool to write applications for both environment. If that down here is like or that is environment A and B where it's not just on one side. It's for everything. And it can run disconnected in that sense. You can just do it for your own premises work. You don't need to use the cloud to use Microsoft DevOps technologies, et cetera, et cetera. There is like actually a version you can install. And the same holds true when we talk about data layers, right? We talked about Azure Arc data services that could run here where we have Azure Arc data services. But then we also have this thing called SQL. We have SQL over here quite in different flavors. We have other Azure data services here. And so here too, independent of hardware, your environment or whatever, Microsoft gives you a capability. Doesn't matter where you are. You can install SQL server anywhere in any cloud, in any telco hoster, whatever it is you want SQL. You can have SQL on both ends and you can use just SQL in a hybrid manner. No problem at all. And on the connectivity side, without our communication side going too deep into it, there are sessions online also just made a recent vlog about it. How we uniquely positioned where you can really make Azure your central hub in your network communication. Also here we have from, if that is network technologies that you use from Hyper-V or HCI or whatever, there's like your corporate network, for example. And then Azure here actually has a lot of awesome and network services that you can use. This Azure VVAN to mention one Azure Front Door as an example that really allows you to easily connect all your branch offices. You can even do your data center traffic through the Microsoft backbone and things like that. So a lot of options here, again on both sides of the house and then identity, that's almost the easiest one, right? Everybody knows AD and then we have Azure AD on the other end, but AD also has Active Directory, Business to Consumer, Business to Business is an awesome solution again on both ends of the house that you can use, right? It's not just one thing, it's like everything. And then when we talk about security and management, we know there we have a whole bunch of suite. Azure Arc is currently in high demand. A lot of people wanna learn because it's so easily spread across everything, but the security jobs, you have Azure Sentinel as an example, you have the Azure Security Center. Those are all things standalone, even without Arc that you could use to secure your environments and on-premises there. We have the Windows Defender, we have all these security suites and as we just heard now in the Q2 closing, the security suite now makes $10 billion in revenues. It's a huge business part of Microsoft's security. And so here, again, from built-in in Windows, security stuff to the Azure Security Center, Sentinel, there is something across that whole thing. And when I look often at our competition, and I see, for example, they can be super strong in one of the dimensions as an example, or just in one area. But if you were to really look like is like, okay, specifically also in security, what we do with Microsoft 365 where you can encrypt files regardless of where they're located, where you can just invoke access to somebody from a file that he has or stored on his, any file share service that he wants to use of his preference, and I think that's the difference. And so for me, I would always use this as a thing when I say, what workload are we moving? And then see what does the solution do? And if you have natively integration because you have the best, the same on both sides, it's not gonna be in all cases, but I think the more dimensions you can check off because you have an identical service or a cloud version of the service on the other side, it's gonna make life a whole bunch of easier than if everything is just purely for integration because we all know every integration points is potential risk that you need to manage, that you need to try to govern, and requires to use different tools, like we talked earlier. And while you have this wide spread of different tools to take care of it, it is important that you start to simplifying that. You don't wanna add on because technology is gonna just increase. It's gonna be faster. We're gonna be faster time to market so you have to become agile. And if you have thousands of tools and different things, it's gonna be very hard to keep up, which in the end then also is a challenge for you with your time to market and situations like these. Yeah, no, this is when I saw this, this is super interesting to like, actually kind of like when you select products, you always, our solutions, you always look at like one of your problems probably, and then you look at the solution and you think, okay, that's a solution where we run in the cloud or then you have a solution, okay, this is what we run on-prem. But obviously when you come to like define a strategy, you probably need to make that step back and actually look at, okay, maybe I run this today in my data center, but maybe I wanna have it later on somewhere else or maybe for now I run it in the cloud, but maybe I wanna have the chance to use it also at my edge location or in my own premises solution. So having these options and knowing that there is a solution which like offers both worlds or even brings them together, right? I mean, we see that like in the management part you showed, right? There we have a lot of like Azure Arc which actually allows us to onboard services like we run on-prem, but then we also have management solutions, which for example, like Windows Admin Center or System Center and all that, which also allows us to like manage our own-prem environment, but then also at the same time suddenly can also be the gateway to actually connect these two worlds together. And I think that is something really to understand that it's, and again, you make absolutely sense here when we talked about hybrid, not just being a single product or something like that, being like a platform, I think that made absolutely a lot of sense now. I think like just not to go on and on because I know we can talk for this forever, but I think a important step is here is like how you say if you renovate your house, you need more than just a hammer. You can do a whole bunch of things with a hammer, but maybe you need a saw, maybe you need a drill, maybe you need brushes to paint. I don't know how easy to bear to paint with a hammer. So you need different tools, right? And if you have a partner, you're self-stored, that sells you all the tools you need to accomplish the task, think of Microsoft a little bit this way. We're honestly, all the cloud providers have very much a hammer or a drill perspective and what you just meant to be zooming out. And I'm not that big of a core phonetic, but I always say like, if you jump straight into the product and me as a person, if I jump into comparing cars, I may jump straight to horsepower, zero to hundreds of kilometers per hour speed. And if I just jump into the cars, I may come to the conclusion that I need a McLaren or a Porsche Turbo or whatever it is. But if I talk to my wife and depending on your financial situation, she might say, how are you gonna have the kids to soccer train in your McLaren, right? And so understanding the dimensions of the need or the requirements of your application versus jumping straight into a weight, marketing through that word at me or through this product at me and really come to the conclusion, okay? It's gonna be family trips, it's gonna be soccer practice and a lot of turn. And that's the reason why a lot of car makers make high horsepower fast cars with a lot of space to cater to demand. But if you just jump straight in right here on the feature comparison, you run at the risk of losing the bigger picture to really understand, wait, wait, let's take a breath, let's take a step back and look at it holistically across all dimensions versus just like, oh my goodness, that's the fastest car, I'm gonna get this one. Yeah, no, absolutely. Makes a lot of sense that you actually look at the ecosystem actually which a platform can provide, not just like, okay, one of the features if you probably find now really good, but then at the end, I mean, as the cloud changes anyway so fast, it's probably not that good in a couple of months if you look at it. No, this was really interesting. And it gives like a bit of view of like why we should actually look at, like what should we actually look at when we talk about hybrid, right? And we obviously have a ton of different sessions driving in to like the things you showed us like you probably mentioned, identity, security. We have a ton of sessions on Azure Arc and obviously a lot of other topics which are super interesting. So if you by the way wanna learn more on these sessions, if you wanna watch out the sessions, check out aka.ms slash itops talks. There you can find absolutely more sessions to drill actually down into the technology we just mentioned and discussed. So Dave, with that, I wanted to know like if I wanna now know more about what Azure has to offer in hybrid and if I wanna learn more about what we just talked about, where should people go? Anyway. No, I'm seriously, that is a really hard question. So one resource that Thomas just mentioned, the block that him and his colleagues are doing, I think that's a must follow. They consistently cover a lot of these hybrid topics in the IT ops talk. So I would definitely subscribe to this. If you are ready to take maybe the next step and you wanna more formalize it with learnings, then I would go check out Microsoft Learn, MS Learn. You can use any search engine you'll get there. And then as with everything else that you use YouTube for, I can guarantee you there is a Microsoft Azure, there is a Microsoft Clouds channel that you can easily subscribe. Mechanics is a very good place that gives you a quick nuggets information about hybrid and other technologies. And yeah, I would say those are the key things use MS Learn, IT ops talk. And then if you're a YouTuber, go and subscribe to those YouTube channels that will bring you a lot of those videos right to your front door. Awesome. Thank you very much. So we will definitely put all the links in descriptions of this video. So you can easily find these resources and we have a couple more as well. So with that, I really wanna say thank you, Dave for taking the time to record that video and be part of this event. It was really helpful to understand the whole hybrid offerings we have in the Azure platform. And now actually we have that for a very long time. Actually, as you said, hybrid by design. So thank you very much, Dave. And people, if you wanna watch more sessions as I just mentioned and wanna drill down deeper into the technology parts, for example, for Azure Arc, for Azure Stack, for Azure Stack HCI, identity, security and many, many more, check out aka.ms slash IT ops talks where you can find all the sessions and videos for you to watch. So with that, I just wanna say thank you for watching and hopefully see you in another video.