One less-than-glamorous aspect of managing infrastructure is keeping those systems up to date. In these current times, it is a necessity to keep your operating systems on supported releases and up to date with security and reliability patches. What also comes with this is the need to support your business customers and maintain their platforms on a budget. This translates to keeping systems around forming your legacy systems. Software vendors, such as Microsoft, provide customers with mainstream support, however, they realize that not all organizations can keep up with the pace, and as such they provide extended support options, but they can be costly. So as an IT engineer, what are your options?
Cloud computing has been around for quite some time now and the management platforms for cloud infrastructure have become robust in terms of security, automation, and life-cycle management. Cloud adopters embrace the ability to manage their infrastructure from anywhere, scale up and down on demand, and do this at scale. They gain meaningful insights through AI-driven analytics and can maintain their fleet the with robust and ever-evolving toolsets. But how does this help you?
Managing your on-premises infrastructure via one set of tools and using a different set of tools for your public cloud systems can become a challenge. One way to simplify this is to adopt a platform that can manage both in a familiar, flexible, and mature fashion. Bring in Azure Arc.
Azure Arc is a bridge between your on-premises infrastructure and the Azure management plane. Integrating your systems with Azure Arc allows you to manage them just like native cloud systems. This enables you to integrate with performance and log management using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics or Resource Graph. What this also brings is cloud orchestration for your systems patching and why we are here: Onboarding your systems to Azure Arc allows you to opt-in to extended support updates (ESU) on a monthly pay-as-you-go basis so you are not locked in to 1-year or 3-year terms for traditional extended support. This provides you the cost flexibility of the cloud along with a streamlined delivery experience including keyless delivery and built-in inventory detailing your covered systems, on top of all the other benefits Azure Arc provide.
Read more about ESU for your legacy Windows Server 2012 systems. End of support is October 10, 2023.
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