Microsoft’s Strategy In The Private-Cloud Computing World
The private-cloud computing world has been bombarded with a barrage of service providers. In the thick of this barrage, Microsoft has emerged with innovative and accessible ideas. To start off, Microsoft’s private-cloud platform includes the general purpose windows server and the system center, which is optimized for top management.
The thing which makes Microsoft different from other private-cloud service providers is that they have come up with a fourfold strategy that easily surpasses any other competitor in the market. The first fundamental of their strategy revolves around the notion that all the infrastructure that a company deploys will be impactful only if the business is productively able to run applications on top of it. Bound to simplify the entire application life cycle, Microsoft gives visibility to the internals of the application and simultaneously gives rich diagnostics to the operator.
Interestingly, Microsoft’s private-cloud solution supports multiple hypervisors. So, whether it be VMware, Citrix or Hyper-V, Microsoft is comfortable with any of them. The interesting aspect of the scenario is that Microsoft has made cross-platform integration much easier, and users now have the liberty to join, while at the same time interoperating with other tool sets they find easier to use.
What Microsoft’s next fundamental points to is a cloud on the user’s terms. This signifies that users start from where they are, and that they do not have to reboot or retool themselves as their private-cloud transition takes place. Time and valuable resources are effectively saved in this way.
Moving on to the private cloud’s infrastructure, Microsoft has one of the most productive architectures one could think of. It starts by analyzing the resources of an organization, which includes inspecting the different types of storage and hypervisors. Once everything is discovered, the organization can dynamically optimize processes. So predominantly, the organization is moving virtual machines around, making sure that the clusters are balanced and checking that the data center is utilized appropriately. This is followed by the delivery of resources to a self-service infrastructure, where they can be allocated to the appropriate business units.
Microsoft is allowing users to adopt the private cloud at their pace and on their terms. These strategies may have led Microsoft to win a handsome market share including market giants such as Coca-Cola, but the cloud-computing world is extremely volatile. Let us wait and see what lies ahead.
By Haris Smith
