The modern business landscape demands flexibility, scalability, and seamless integration across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments. As organizations navigate this complex landscape, the Cloud Adoption Framework’s Ready methodology can be a powerful guide, helping you prepare your environment for a successful hybrid and multicloud strategy.

At the heart of this approach are Azure landing zones - the building blocks of any Azure cloud adoption environment. These landing zones account for crucial elements like scale, security governance, networking, identity, cost management, and monitoring. When preparing for a hybrid and multicloud deployment, your environment considerations may require an even more nuanced approach.

A consistent, unified environment for hybrid and multicloud deployments hinges on several key factors: network topology and connectivity, operational process controls for governance, security and compliance, and seamless automation, development, and DevOps practices across heterogeneous environments. This is where Azure Arc becomes a game-changer, enabling hybrid and multicloud architectures and providing the technologies to address these critical design areas.

Evaluating Your Cloud Mix

Choosing a hybrid and multicloud environment involves a range of strategic decisions, not a single binary choice. Before configuring your Azure environment, it’s crucial to identify how your cloud environment will support your specific mix of cloud-hosting choices. The Cloud Adoption Framework presents three common reference customers to illustrate this:

  1. Hybrid-first customer: Fabrikam, a customer heavily invested in aging datacenters, prioritizes cost and governance. Legacy IT priorities and aging infrastructure hinder innovation, driving early cloud adoption.

  2. Azure-first customer: Contoso, a customer that has completed its first wave of digital transformation, acquired companies, and added customers in regulated industries. Its top priority is still innovation, but its multicloud environment requires a focus on efficient, scalable operations to support its acquisition strategy.

  3. Multicloud-first customer: Tailwind Traders, an early adopter of other public cloud providers like GCP and AWS. With some local datacenter assets and edge devices, Tailwind Traders' biggest priority is growth, driven by customer retail requirements and the need for improved operations to enable efficient scaling.

Regardless of your cloud mix, a few key considerations are critical when preparing your environment for hybrid and multicloud:

  • What mixture of hybrid, edge, and multicloud environments do you support today, and what mixture best aligns with your future strategy?
  • Do you want to operate each platform independently or through unified operations and a single pane of glass approach?

Introducing Azure Arc

Azure Arc is a powerful solution that enables you to simplify complex, distributed environments across on-premises, edge, and multicloud landscapes. By extending Azure’s management capabilities to any infrastructure, Azure Arc helps you:

  • Organize and govern your sprawling databases, Kubernetes clusters, and servers across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments from a central location.
  • Manage Kubernetes applications at scale using DevOps techniques and consistent deployment from source control.
  • Run Azure services anywhere, with automated patching, upgrades, security, and scaling on-demand for your data estate.

Configuring Your Azure Environment

The Cloud Adoption Framework’s Ready methodology provides a structured approach to preparing your environment for cloud adoption, including the use of Azure landing zones. When it comes to hybrid and multicloud scenarios, you’ll need to configure an Azure environment that can support, govern, and manage your diverse cloud resources.

This process involves reviewing the Azure landing zone concept, considering the key design areas, comparing your requirements to the available implementation options, and learning how to transition existing Azure environments to the Azure landing zone conceptual architecture.

Azure Arc as a Landing Zone Accelerator

Azure Arc resources can be seamlessly integrated into your application landing zone subscriptions, treated as first-class citizens alongside native Azure resources. This enables you to apply a unified set of controls, governance, and operational practices across your hybrid and multicloud environment, regardless of where the resources are located.

The article explores several common examples of how Azure Arc resources can be projected into Azure landing zones, such as:

  1. Projecting domain controllers outside of Azure
  2. Integrating on-premises datacenters into Azure
  3. Bringing remote application resources into Azure
  4. Extending the life of Windows Server instances nearing end-of-support through Azure Arc-enabled Extended Security Updates

By leveraging Azure Arc as a landing zone accelerator, you can achieve the centralized organization, governance, and operational control needed to thrive in a hybrid and multicloud world.

[Source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftDocs/cloud-adoption-framework/main/docs/scenarios/hybrid/ready.md]