Overview
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses increasingly rely on hybrid and multi-cloud environments to optimize their IT infrastructure. However, managing and securing these environments can be complex, as they span across various platforms—on-premises, edge, and public clouds—each with its own set of challenges regarding security, compliance, and cost management.
This is where Azure Arc comes in as a transformative solution. By leveraging Azure Arc, SNP empowers organizations to seamlessly manage and secure their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Azure Arc provides a unified, consistent management platform that allows businesses to monitor, govern, and secure their entire IT ecosystem, regardless of where resources are located.
Key Benefits of Azure Arc for Businesses:
- Unified Management: Azure Arc offers a single pane of glass for managing and securing workloads across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. This reduces the complexity of managing disparate platforms and streamlines operations.
- Improved Governance and Compliance: With Azure Arc, businesses can enforce consistent governance policies across their infrastructure. This ensures that organizations stay compliant with industry standards and regulatory requirements, regardless of where data and applications are hosted.
- Cost Efficiency: Azure Arc enables organizations to optimize their cloud spend by allowing them to leverage existing on-premises resources, scale efficiently, and reduce the costs associated with managing multiple, fragmented environments.
- Enhanced Security: By extending Azure’s security capabilities to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Azure Arc provides a comprehensive security posture, helping to mitigate risks and safeguard critical data and applications across all environments.
- Operational Efficiency: Businesses can automate management tasks, integrate services, and drive greater operational efficiency, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than dealing with the intricacies of maintaining separate infrastructure silos.
Azure Arc, with SNP’s expertise, enables businesses to confidently navigate the complexities of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It ensures full visibility, control, and security over the entire IT infrastructure, allowing organizations to stay agile, compliant, and cost-effective while driving innovation.
Our Approach
Azure Governance
- To help businesses minimize resource “sprawl” and maintain control over their Azure environment, SNP utilizes Azure subscriptions effectively.
- Fine-grained access management in Azure enables organizations to securely control and limit access to Azure resources, ensuring that users have only the permissions needed for their roles. This approach is essential for minimizing security risks and maintaining regulatory compliance.
- To prevent the accidental deletion of Azure resources, SNP leverages several Azure features and best practices that add extra layers of protection for critical resources.
- To ensure Azure policies align with an organization’s standards and compliance requirements, SNP follows a structured approach to defining and implementing these policies is essential.
- With Azure, SNP provides various cost management mechanisms to help organizations control and optimize cloud spending, offering visibility, budgeting tools, and governance policies to keep costs in check.
Hybrid Connectivity
- Discovery and assessment are critical first steps in evaluating a client’s current network and infrastructure, especially in preparation for cloud migration, security enhancement, or performance optimization.
- Using edge devices at data centers and remote offices allows organizations to process data closer to where it’s generated, reducing latency, saving bandwidth, and improving reliability for critical operations.
- Designing a high-performance hybrid networking layout involves connecting on-premises data centers, remote offices, and cloud resources with a flexible, scalable, and secure architecture. For global enterprises, an advanced hub-spoke or full-mesh connectivity model can support high-performance applications, streamline connectivity, and improve security.
- To secure and encrypt connectivity between on-premises data centers, remote locations, and Azure, a point-to-point encrypted connectivity solution is implemented using a combination of technologies that offer secure, scalable, and manageable connections.
- Configuring high availability (HA) and redundancy ensures that your infrastructure remains operational even during failures or disruptions. The goal is to design systems that minimize downtime and provide continuous access to critical applications and services.
- Testing connectivity is a critical part of ensuring that your network, applications, and cloud resources are properly configured for high availability, redundancy, and security. It involves verifying that all systems are accessible, communications between services are functioning correctly, and failover mechanisms are working as expected.
Azure Unified Security & Operations
- To establish a common identity across both on-premises and Azure environments, the goal is to have a unified identity and access management (IAM) solution. This ensures that users can seamlessly authenticate and access resources regardless of whether they are on-premises or in the cloud, while also maintaining security and compliance standards.
- Continuous health validation of a hybrid identity solution is essential to ensure the ongoing reliability, security, and compliance of the integrated on-premises and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) environment. SNP implements a continuous validation strategy helps detect issues early, minimize disruptions, and maintain secure and seamless access for users across both environments.
Azure Arc
- Tracking and organizing the inventory of multicloud and hybrid infrastructure can be a challenging task, especially when businesses operate across various environments, such as on-premises data centers, Azure, and other cloud platforms. Azure Arc simplifies this by providing a unified management layer across these diverse infrastructures, allowing for centralized visibility, governance, and control.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Azure provides a mechanism to manage and restrict access to resources based on roles assigned to users, groups, or service principals. SNP applies RBAC for various remote management activities helps enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that users and applications have only the access they need to perform their tasks, particularly when working in hybrid or multicloud. environments.
- To unlock the power of Azure Security anywhere, businesses can leverage a combination of Azure's built-in security tools and services, along with hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities that allow them to secure their data, applications, and workloads no matter where they reside—whether on-premises, in Azure, or across other clouds and edge environments.
The SNP Advantage
Azure Arc-enabled Servers :
To manage Windows and Linux physical servers and virtual machines (VMs) hosted outside of Azure, on your corporate network, or with other cloud providers, Azure Arc is an ideal solution. It provides a seamless way to extend Azure's management and governance capabilities to your hybrid and multi-cloud environments, giving you a unified control plane for your entire infrastructure.
Organize and Govern Across Environments:
To centrally organize and govern databases, Kubernetes clusters, and servers across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments, Azure Arc provides a powerful solution. With Azure Arc, you can extend Azure's management and governance capabilities to your entire hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, giving you a single control plane for seamless management across all resources.
Run Data Services Anywhere:
To automate patching, upgrades, security, and scale on-demand across on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments for your data estate, Azure Arc and other integrated Azure services provide a comprehensive solution. This solution helps ensure your infrastructure remains up-to-date, secure, and scalable, regardless of where your resources are hosted.
Multi Cloud Management:
Managing a multi-cloud environment that spans Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure requires a unified approach to governance, security, cost management, and performance optimization. While each cloud provider offers its own set of tools and services, Azure Arc and other multi-cloud management platforms can help streamline operations, offering consistent management and orchestration across these clouds.
Governance & Security:
Azure provides a rich set of built-in policies that help organizations implement governance and compliance in their cloud environment. These policies can be applied to enforce specific configurations or restrict actions to ensure best practices and compliance requirements are met.
Azure Arc Management:
To effectively manage your hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure at scale, searchable inventory and consistent VM extensions are essential components that improve visibility, control, and efficiency. With Azure Arc, these capabilities are extended to on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments, offering a unified approach to managing resources.
Azure Services to any Infrastructure:
Extending the Azure control plane with Azure Arc allows organizations to achieve standardized visibility, streamlined operations, and robust compliance across diverse resources and environments. With Azure Arc, users can manage a wide array of assets—including Windows and Linux servers, SQL Server databases, and Kubernetes clusters—from a single, unified platform, regardless of where they’re located: on-premises, at the edge, or in multi-cloud setups (AWS, Google Cloud, etc.).
Cloud Native Apps Anywhere, at Scale:
With Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, you can centrally code and deploy applications confidently to any Kubernetes distribution, whether it’s on-premises, at the edge, or across multi-cloud environments like AWS or Google Cloud. This capability allows teams to develop and deploy faster while adhering to consistent standards for deployment, configuration, security, and observability.
Data Services Anywhere:
Azure Arc empowers organizations to use cloud innovation flexibly, deploying Azure services anywhere—whether in on-premises datacenters, edge environments, or across multi-cloud platforms. This capability allows businesses to take advantage of Azure’s robust cloud practices and automation, bringing the agility of the cloud to wherever it's needed.
Why SNP Technologies for your Cloud Transformation Project?
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What Our Clients Say
At our organization, we prioritize continuous modernization of our app development and hosting to accelerate our workflow and keep IT costs under control. Azure cloud has been central to these efforts, and our relationship with SNP has been crucial to our success with the platform. SNP has been instrumental in guiding us through critical migration decisions, helping us efficiently roll out our applications on Azure. Through their expertise, we learned that Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was the optimal hosting solution for our open-source apps. Additionally, SNP helped us automate deployments with Azure DevOps and set up robust monitoring for health and performance feedback, ensuring our apps run smoothly and efficiently. Having an expert Microsoft partner like SNP on our team has been a significant advantage. Their guidance helped us reach our goals faster, with high-quality results and cost savings along the way.
Director of IT for a Leading Healthcare Provider
SNP has proven to be a true partner in our migration to Azure. They not only understood our applications and environments but also grasped the challenges we faced. Through their expertise, SNP is helping us innovate on Azure in new and creative ways. They’ve gone beyond being a service provider – SNP has truly become OUR partner in this journey.
Senior VP of a Leading Online Service Provider
SNP went above and beyond by taking the time to sit down with me and develop a comprehensive long-term plan, utilizing the latest technology. They helped us determine the best way to leverage this technology to meet the specific needs of our application. It’s rare to find a partner who is willing to go that extra mile to truly understand our operations and ensure the technology is perfectly aligned with our business goals. Their dedication to understanding our unique challenges and providing tailored solutions has been invaluable. We deeply appreciate SNP’s commitment to our success and look forward to continuing this strong partnership.
Director of Global Technology of a Leading Discreet Manufacturing Company
SNP has been an invaluable asset in transitioning our digital signage application from locally hosted servers to Microsoft Azure. Their team possesses both the breadth and depth of expertise in Azure and its many offerings, ensuring a seamless migration.
Technology Director of a Leading Medical School
SNP was brought in to take over an ongoing project and had to act quickly to keep it on track. They proved to have an efficient and responsive technical team, along with excellent project management, ensuring the project stayed on schedule. I highly recommend their services.
Sr. System Analyst of a Leading Retail Company
We would like to extend our sincere thanks to SNP for their invaluable assistance in establishing our Cloud Data Platform on Microsoft Azure. SNP’s professionalism, combined with their deep expertise in Azure technologies, has been critical in helping us implement the platform as planned and within a short timeframe. Our collaboration with SNP was seamless, and the project was executed efficiently from start to finish. One of the key elements of this partnership was SNP’s willingness to share their extensive knowledge with our team, ensuring that our associates gained a deeper understanding of the platform and its capabilities. As a result, our cloud data platform is now robust, scalable, and fully aligned with our business objectives, thanks to the collaborative efforts and dedication of the SNP team. We are grateful for their ongoing support and look forward to continuing this successful partnership.
AGM – Application Development
From the outset, SNP approached our meetings with concrete solutions rather than just suggestions. The team’s deep experience and unwavering drive for success were immediately apparent. As we progressed, our confidence in SNP as a trusted partner only grew stronger. Working closely together during both regular business hours and weekends, SNP seamlessly became an extension of our IT team. We tackled challenges, celebrated successes, and worked toward a common goal. The result of our collaboration is a highly organized and smoothly running Azure IaaS environment. This solution has not only provided us with a reliable and secure platform for hosting virtual machines, but also unlocked new platform features that were previously unavailable in our on-premises IT model. We look forward to future projects with the SNP team, particularly as we explore opportunities in data analysis and AI.
Director of IT Infrastructure
Since SNP assisted us with several SQL-related projects, we’ve built a strong and enduring partnership. Our collaboration has truly been a team effort, with both teams working together day and night, including weekends. Through this partnership, we’ve established a foundation of trust and excellence that has been key to our success. In 2022, SNP played a pivotal role in migrating our on-premises data center to Azure, which involved server workloads, over 70 applications, and their interdependencies. Not only did SNP handle the technical challenges, but they also implemented best practices in networking, security, identity, and governance. This migration extended well into 2023, and throughout the process, SNP displayed an unmatched level of commitment, frequently taking calls at early and late hours to address the high priority of this engagement. As a result of this successful partnership, we are now working with SNP to assess and modernize our data warehouse environment with Microsoft Fabric. Furthermore, SNP is currently involved in several Generative AI projects with us, aimed at enhancing business efficiency and leveraging innovation to meet our mission objectives. Looking ahead, we are excited to continue our collaboration with SNP for many years to come.
VP of Technology Solutions & Architecture
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to both Microsoft and SNP for their invaluable assistance and expertise, which were pivotal in making our Azure migration a resounding success. Thanks to their efforts, we’ve achieved performance from our Azure servers that mirrors our previous on-premises infrastructure, with no notable deficiencies. Moreover, the pricing estimates provided by Microsoft prior to migration were accurate and aligned perfectly with our expectations. This level of precision and support has been crucial to the success of our migration. We are truly grateful for our continued partnership with both Microsoft and SNP, and we look forward to building on this success in the future.
VP of Information Systems
Frequently Asked Questions
Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help you build applications and services with the flexibility to run across datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. Develop cloud-native applications with a consistent development, operations, and security model.
Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes allows you to attach Kubernetes clusters running anywhere so that you can manage and configure them in Azure.
It's common to use Azure Arc to monitor your servers with Azure Monitor and Microsoft Sentinel and secure them with Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
