New Cloud Says | What? ! Can Sun Tzu's Art of War also guide cloud strategy?

It may be difficult to notice, but now our life can be completely described as "days on the cloud": from taxis to takeaway orders, not to mention office software and cloud storage. Where there is data, there is a "cloud". From this point of view, it is very easy to understand why "cloud" is called the most extensive infrastructure at present.

According to the "White Paper on the Development of China's Cloud Computing Industry", the scale of China's cloud computing industry will exceed 300 billion yuan in 2023. "Cloud infrastructure" will bring huge opportunities to the industry. On the other hand, it is enterprises that take advantage of the cloud to take advantage of the situation. According to the survey, 63% of Chinese enterprises choose to actively embrace technological innovations such as cloud computing to promote comprehensive digital transformation from product upgrades, business transformation to production process automation.

Microsoft has introduced Azure technology to the Chinese market since 2014, and its partner 21Vianet operates the Azure service. With the operation of the third data center in North China in March this year, the capacity of the Azure matrix service will be doubled.

The future has come, ride the clouds to go far. With the approaching of the new area of Azure, "Fog and Clouds", we will launch a series of in-depth articles on "New Cloud Talk", which will elaborate on the strategic thinking of enterprises in choosing cloud, taking advantage of cloud, moving cloud and building cloud from an industrial perspective.

"Sun Tzu's Art of War" has it said: In all the methods of military use, a thousand chariots, a thousand leather chariots, a hundred thousand armor, and a thousand miles of food are provided.

Although cloud infrastructure is a new thing, corporate strategies are always changing, and it is often the thinking of historical precipitation that can help us clear the fog and obtain the truth. The cloud era has come, how should enterprises choose cloud technology? Let’s make an interesting comparison between a company’s cloud strategy and Sun Tzu’s Art of War:

The cloud brings unprecedented growth possibilities to enterprises, but also brings the complexity of governance that cannot be underestimated. So a generalized cloud strategy makes no sense. At present, the essence of cloud strategy is to choose a suitable combination of on-premises deployment, private cloud, and public cloud. According to the Harris Poll, 86% of respondents plan to increase their investment in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Almost all respondents said they keep some of their business data on-premises due to regulatory concerns.

This is like the sudden appearance of complex terrain on the marching road. The assault troops may be well-trained for the plains, but what if the left flank is hilly and the right flank is valley? This requires Azure Arc, which was born for the "cloud". By projecting existing non-Azure on-premises or other cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager, Azure Arc greatly simplifies governance and management by allowing users to manage the entire environment with a single pane of glass Use familiar Azure services and management capabilities.

In China, many customers' applications are deployed in local data centers and cannot go to the cloud for regulatory or other reasons. Then, Azure can also consider this as part of a multi-cloud environment, and through Azure Arc, innovative tools and services, such as cloud-native container environments, data services, etc., can also be placed on-premises. Or customers adopt a multi-public cloud strategy. Due to the different situations of each vendor, when they release cloud-native applications, resource scheduling, monitoring, and application release are inconsistent, and operational governance is extremely cumbersome, but Azure Arc can monitor, schedule, and unify. Post, save a lot of effort.

When multi-cloud and hybrid cloud become the basic landform of cloud strategy, breaking through the complex environment of data center, multi-vendor cloud, and edge expansion, only Chiche such as Azure Arc can draw a winning arc to adapt to various cloud environments.

The data requirements in the cloud infrastructure era are rapidly evolving in three directions, and these three directions are precisely the reasons why Azure's newly released Synapse last year attracted the attention of the industry.

First, the evolution to fusion. At the architecture level, Microsoft Azure Synapse has taken the lead in realizing the separation of storage and computing and the integration of lakes and warehouses. In fact, local data, cross-cloud data, application and IoT data must have a fusion perspective in order to discover value. At the application layer, on top of various diversified high-performance computing engines, people are now placing more emphasis on consistent experience. A more subtle trend turn is the convergence of industries. With the accumulation of practice, industry data templates are formed, and cross-industry analysis has become an evolution direction that must be embraced.

Second, evolve to business. After the baptism of the wave of big data, enterprises have passed the stage of cognition of the value of data, and digitalization has also entered the stage of mining/using data from collecting/accumulating data. For today's enterprises, the focus of data is no longer worrying about infrastructure, but how to use data to better serve the enterprise. From this point of view, the "pragmatism" of Azure is particularly prominent. At the application level, Azure has always held high the banner of "no code is productivity", the purpose is to shorten the path from data to business, let the application return to the tool attribute, and everything serves the business. At the practical level, Azure leverages Microsoft’s best practices across global industries to break through AI from the cloud, break down industry barriers, and integrate cross-industry data calibers and terminology, laying a solid foundation for companies to use data more conveniently and discover insights. foundation.

Furthermore, the evolution to the ultimate security. Today, the data security that enterprises are concerned about is not only at the level of preventing intrusion. More, enterprises will look to the whole chain of data governance. At the same time, with the emergence of data regulations in various regions, compliance governance has also become an important aspect of data governance. Azure has the most compliance certifications among cloud service providers in the world, so it can solve customers' worries and devote their energy to matters more closely related to the business.

The industry has long agreed that cloud-native applications are designed for the next era of software development and cloud technology. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF: "Cloud native technologies enable enterprises to build and run scalable applications in modern and dynamic environments such as public, private and hybrid clouds." According to an IDC report, cloud-native applications In 2018, it was only 40%, and by 2023, the proportion of enterprise cloud-native applications will exceed 80%.

There is no doubt that cloud-native applications can be described as the armored soldiers of the cloud infrastructure era. So, how can we bring out such "100,000" strong soldiers? In Microsoft's view, the first key is not technology, but practice. Azure brings together the latest and best practices from a large number of the Global 500. Not only are these enterprise best practices often groundbreaking, but more valuable, they are quickly functionalized in Azure as a capability that other enterprises can use quickly and iteratively. In a sense, Azure is a cloud-native application "experimental field" shared by advanced enterprises around the world. The most valuable fruits here are not only products, but also the best practices of global leading enterprises.

On this basis, Azure Arc pushes the concept of cloud native from the public cloud to the local data center, further expanding the scope of application of best practices.

In addition, Azure also excels in the convenience of unified management and global multi-layer observability. At the same time, as enterprises begin to focus on the security software supply chain, the huge investment in the Azure cloud-native security software supply chain is beginning to turn into a dazzling advantage. Not only the annual cloud-native security investment of up to 60 billion yuan, but more importantly, it provides 24x7x365 professional enterprise-level services in cloud-native service support, and carefully guards every step of the enterprise's "cloud middle road".

As one of the fastest growing public cloud services in the world, Azure provides intelligent, large-scale, global coverage, security, compliance, trustworthy, and neutral matrix services, and always maintains rapid innovation and continuous expansion of service capabilities.
With the operation of the new Azure region operated by 21Vianet, the Azure matrix service capability will double and expand, providing long-term sufficient capacity resources for China's digital transformation in the future. While helping Chinese customers and partners to achieve technological innovation and obtain business value, we will continue to help them accelerate their digital transformation under the new normal, reshape corporate resilience, and provide a steady stream of "grass" for Chinese companies' cloud transformation.