Recently introduced, Windows Server 2025 brings advanced security, improved performance, and cloud agility. Here’s insight as to what that means to Azure customers.
Author: Howard M. Cohen
Hard to believe it’s been 15 years since Microsoft gave us the ability to synchronize Active Directory for on-premises networks with Active Directory for Azure, thus enabling hybrid management for the first time.
It was 2010. Everyone wanted to be able to call their products “hybrid.” The word gained popularity as we all learned about public and private clouds and how when they were combined, perhaps with on-premises networks, they were considered hybrid. Since everybody using cloud already had some on-premises presence, literally everybody’s networks were becoming hybrid.
Hybrid was hot!
Hybrid Management
Almost a decade later, customers were facing a sprawl of resources spread across multiple datacenters, clouds, and edge locations. They needed a cloud-native control plane to inventory, organize, and enforce policies for their IT resources wherever they are, from a central place.
In 2019, Microsoft introduced Azure Arc to extend Azure management and security to any infrastructure, including Linux and Windows servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge. This meant users could have consistent management across these different environments using such tools as Azure Resource Manager, Microsoft Azure Cloud Shell, Azure portal, API, and Microsoft Azure Policy. This literally meant customers could run Azure data services anywhere.
Windows Server 2025 and Azure
It was back in 2012 when then Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, Satya Nadella first informed everyone that Windows Server 2012 is considered “the CloudOS” packed with “cloud-ready features” including significant improvements to Hyper-V virtualization platform and storage infrastructure.
Fast-forward another dozen years and Microsoft releases Windows Server 2025 which represents a significant step towards seamless hybrid cloud management for Azure customers, allowing them to easily manage both on-premises and cloud-based Windows Server instances with enhanced security and performance through deep integration with a significantly improved Azure Arc.
These improvements introduced in Windows Server 2025 include providing seamless integration with hybrid cloud environments, allowing for easier management and security of on-premises Windows Server instances through the Azure portal, including features like advanced monitoring, update management, best practices assessments, and simplified disaster recovery configuration with Azure Site Recovery, all while leveraging Azure Arc’s capabilities for unified management across diverse environments.
The new, improved Azure Arc delivers simplified onboarding processes, and advanced features like hotpatching for near-zero downtime updates; essentially making it easier to leverage the full potential of Azure services while maintaining existing on-premises infrastructure. These improvements translate into simplification of hybrid environment management, improved security, optimized performance, streamlined migration processes, and cost-efficiency.
And it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there weren’t also some great AI-Powered insights.
The Center of Your Universe
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the IT world knows of the dream of the “single pane of glass,” the fabled “SPOG” from which to manage entire networks. The past 15 years would seem to have moved us further and further from that goal, but now Azure begins to look like the one to rule them all. Hybrid network management from Azure that brings multiple network types plus on-premises infrastructure together.
Windows Server 2025 has been an exciting introduction for Azure customers, and Idenxt stands ready to help you take maximum advantage of it while continuing to manage and protect the mission-critical applications you run, now whether they’re on Azure or not!!!
To learn more, contact us here.
