How does Azure Arc work?
Think of Azure Arc as a bridge that helps you connect your on-premises estate to cloud resources. It unifies your environment with a single pane of glass for control, streamlining your ability to manage operations and security and helping you to continually optimise your environment as your business grows.
Microsoft developed Azure Arc to help organisations manage their increasingly complex IT environments. With a growing number of businesses trying to control a mix of on-premises data centres and multiple cloud services, Azure Arc provides a single platform for managing those resources.
It does this by enabling all resources – Azure or not, on premises or not – to be managed through Azure Resource Manager. This provides many benefits, especially for MSPs and hosting businesses that find themselves with an ever-evolving combination of software, hardware and services. With centralised management, MSPs and hosters enable full technical and business performance of their assets and resources.
With no upfront costs and monthly billing, you and your customers pay only for what you use, unlike with the SPLA model. This helps to reduce costs for the resources you consume only periodically – say, for ERP, payroll or giving campaigns. The same is true for hosting customers who decide to, for example, scale down a virtual machine (VM) or stop a SQL Server instance.
