The 2017 Microsoft Ignite conference was an event where several items were crossed off my bucket list. Not only did I get to spend an hour recording an episode of the Datanauts Podcast with the infamous Jeffrey Snover, creator of PowerShell and all-around nice guy, but I also held the privilege of showcasing Rubrik’s official integration across both Azure and Azure Stack in the expo hall. The idea that cloud-born services, such as elastic compute pools and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) features, can be pushed towards on-prem deployments is fairly magical, and that’s the idea behind Azure Stack.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The real question to answer starts with “why push cloud services to co-exist on premises?” And in this case, I’ll point to the presentation given by Mr. Snover on data center transformation. In it, he shares his thoughts on how the very fabric of being an IT professional is changing. Rather than being tactically focused on resources that create and deploy infrastructure, we’re gaining momentum as strategically-positioned forces that can go beyond staying relevant and actually get ahead of the mounting pile of technical debt that has quagmired progress in the past.

Part of this change is painful since abstraction layers require a tradeoff – giving up control over low-level details in exchange for higher-level automation and orchestration of workloads. I equate this a bit to allowing a hypervisor’s scheduler or container orchestration engine to determine the best placement for a process, thread, or workload. We’ve learned to trust these technologies and embrace the abstraction. The same should be true for lower-level IT operations across on-prem and cloud deployments.

This holds true for Rubrik customers who are making this journey using Cloud Data Management and Microsoft Azure. Take Berkeley College as an example – Rubrik and Azure have helped Berkeley College decrease costs, stay within their data retention policy, and establish a stronger DR strategy. As a result, the college has cut costs by 33 percent, reduced recovery time objective (RTO) to nearly zero, and met compliance requirements by archiving to Microsoft Azure for long-term retention. And this is merely the tip of the iceberg; we have a large swath of folks who are taking this digital transformation journey with us. Watch the video below to hear about CarePoint Health’s story with Rubrik and Azure.

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