Microsoft's cloud computing services, Azure, is now available to users across internet infrastructures, including clouds owned and operated by competitors, Microsoft announced Monday. The new system, called Azure Arc, was unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference that featured a number of new tools and services for enterprise customers.
"It is really about extending what is in the cloud and letting it run anywhere," Julia White, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Azure, told Cheddar from the conference in Orlando, Florida.
Azure Arc is the latest initiative by Microsoft ($MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella to expand the company's software services and further collaboration — instead of competition — with rivals. Azure programs are expected to now be used on clouds owned by Amazon ($AMZN) and Google ($GOOGL). The new offering is also an investment, Microsoft says, given that the company expects that the cloud market to hit $513 billion by 2022.
"While organizations are running systems in data centers and public clouds … the customer wants one single way to run it," White explained. "Customers can have an application, run part of it on Azure, part of it in their data center, part of it even in other public clouds, and then on edge devices and havdae a single unified way to do that."
Microsoft also said that Azure Arc will make cloud based data and applications more secure by centralizing control and security systems through Azure portals.
"We are excited to see Microsoft bringing Azure data services and management to any infrastructure," Erik Vogel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's vice president for customer success, hybrid cloud software, and services, added in a statement.
