In today’s ever-evolving technology landscape, organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid and multicloud strategies to meet their diverse business needs. The Cloud Adoption Framework’s Ready methodology provides a structured approach to prepare your environment for these complex scenarios, with Azure landing zones serving as the building blocks.

Understanding Hybrid and Multicloud in Azure Landing Zones

Azure landing zones are the result of a multi-subscription Azure environment that accounts for scale, security governance, networking, identity, cost management, and monitoring. When preparing for a hybrid and multicloud deployment, you’ll need to consider additional factors, such as network topology, unified operational processes, and consistent automation practices across heterogeneous environments.

Azure Arc plays a crucial role in enabling these hybrid and multicloud architectures. It extends Azure management and services to any infrastructure, allowing you to organize and govern resources across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments from a single pane of glass.

Evaluating Your Cloud Mix

Choosing the right hybrid and multicloud approach involves carefully evaluating your current and future cloud hosting requirements. There are three common cloud mixes to consider:

  1. Hybrid-first: Where most workloads remain on-premises, with a few specific workloads deployed to the edge, Azure, or other cloud providers.
  2. Azure-first: Where most workloads move to Azure, while a few stay on-premises or reside in the edge or other cloud environments.
  3. Multicloud-first: Where the majority of workloads are hosted on other public clouds, such as GCP or AWS, with a few in Azure or at the edge.

Regardless of your cloud mix, you’ll need to configure an Azure environment that can support, govern, and manage your diverse cloud resources. The Cloud Adoption Framework’s Ready methodology provides guidance on reviewing landing zone design areas, evaluating implementation options, and transitioning existing Azure environments to the landing zone conceptual architecture.

Leveraging Azure Arc as a Landing Zone Accelerator

Azure Arc resources, such as servers, Kubernetes clusters, and data services, can be treated as first-class citizens within your Azure landing zones. By projecting these resources into your Azure environment, you can apply unified operations, management, compliance, security, and governance at scale, regardless of where the resources are physically located.

The article explores common examples of how customers can leverage Azure Arc to manage domain controllers, on-premises datacenters, remote application resources, and even servers reaching end-of-support, all from a centralized Azure control plane.

Preparing for the Future with Azure Arc

As you embark on your hybrid and multicloud journey, Azure Arc provides a powerful platform to simplify the management and operation of your diverse cloud resources. By following the guidance in this article, you can configure your Azure environment to support your specific cloud mix, leveraging Azure Arc as an accelerator to achieve your business goals.

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