In a world reshaped by AI, sovereignty requirements and distributed operations, conventional private cloud infrastructures are being outfitted for flexibility, scalability and resilience.

Organizations are under pressure: Legacy applications still need stability and security, while next-gen workloads demand modern, scalable platforms. As a result, cloud customers now demand the public cloud experience — security, compliance and consistent tooling — but with guaranteed control over data residency and operations, according to Meena Gowdar (pictured, right), senior director of product management at Microsoft Corp.

“As a foundation of our strategy, we are extending Azure’s fundamental principles, which are based on security, sovereignty and a consistent operating model, into private cloud,” she said. “What customers love about Azure is extended through Azure Arc, and you get the same security posture, compliance framework and the tooling and processes in the private cloud.”

Gowder and Matt McSpirit (left), senior principal engineering technologist at Dell Technologies Inc.,
spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay for Microsoft Ignite, during an exclusive conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Azure Local — paired with Dell’s infrastructure — forms the backbone of a new adaptive cloud model designed to meet customers exactly where they are while preparing them for what comes next. (* Disclosure below.)

The mandate to restructure the private cloud

IT teams now manage hybrid realities. Some workloads belong in the public cloud, while others need on-prem performance, sovereignty or specialized hardware. The future is a flexible platform that supports both traditional and modern workloads in a unified way, according to McSpirit. Azure Local and Azure Arc implement Azure’s trusted security and operational model directly in private environments, whether on the factory floor or inside a highly regulated national data center.

“The solutions that we provide have to meet the customer’s needs around flexibility and scale, allowing them to grow and shrink as necessary and scale up and scale down,” McSpirit said. “It’s a complex set of challenges that we’re looking to address with some great infrastructure solutions.”

Dell and Microsoft emphasized the unique value of their partnership. With Dell providing server, storage, networking, lifecycle automation and secure onboarding, customers gain a fully supported, end-to-end Azure Local experience. Additionally, by plugging in PowerStore, tens of thousands of existing Dell customers can adopt Azure Local without purchasing new hardware — dramatically lowering barriers to entry, McSpirit added.

“With PowerStore, it’s enabling organizations to scale the compute and the storage independently, so that gives them that flexibility in case business needs change,” he said. “Organizations that have either been investigating new external storage or already have it now have a great solution going forward for that option. PowerStore brings a number of advantages, the advanced data efficiency, which keeps the data reduction always on. That lowers the storage costs without impacting performance.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Microsoft Ignite:

(* Disclosure: Dell sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE