As the only cloud provider to deliver truly consistent hybrid capabilities across cloud and on-premises environments, Microsoft has recently announced new tools and resources to help organizations tap into the power of the hybrid cloud to optimize their business.

Organizations today are rapidly turning to the cloud to leverage the benefits such as increased agility and faster innovation. However, cloud-first is no more restricted to cloud-only, since not all customers – especially large enterprises or highly regulated organizations – are ready or able to move fully to public cloud for a variety of valid reasons like latency concerns, industry regulation, data sovereignty, and customization.

These new tools and resources announced include

• A free Cloud Migration Assessment, which helps organizations discover the servers across their IT environment, analyze their hardware configurations, and provides a detailed report including the estimated cost benefits of moving to Microsoft Azure

• Now organisations can activate their Azure Hybrid Use Benefit directly in the Azure Management Portal, simplifying their path to the cloud in the most cost effective way possible. With the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit they can save up to 40% with Windows Server licenses that include Software Assurance

• Azure Site Recovery is another tool to make the journey to the cloud as easy as possible. This is a tool organisations can use to migrate virtual machines to Azure, and helps in moving applications whether they are running on AWS, VMware, Hyper-V or on physical servers.

With Azure, organizations can get consistent hybrid capabilities across cloud and on-premises environments, offering them the flexibility to choose the optimal location for each application, based on their business requirements and reducing the complexity of moving to the cloud.