Microsoft's Azure Stack promises to be a game changer in the cloud computing market when it goes on general release at the later part of 2017, and we at Tieto are working hard to bring the benefits of Azure Stack to our customers.

Read on to find out more about Azure Stack, azure consulting services, and why utilizing it through Tieto can be the right solution for you and your business.

What is Azure Stack?

Azure Stack is a new on-premises cloud platform that builds on the existing Azure technology from Microsoft. Azure Stack, however, has one distinct advantage - it lets customers use proven Azure services on premises, giving them the chance to choose and move workloads between public cloud and private cloud, either in their own location or in a data centre provided by someone like Tieto, whenever that is needed. 

This brings many benefits to all sorts of organisations and businesses.  A good example is Tieto ourselves; we are using Azure technologies as part of our application development, and our developers are keen to make the most of the new opportunities Azure Stack brings. 

A technical preview of Azure Stack has been available since 2016, giving developers the chance to look at all the features on offer and the final product is due to launch in the later part of 2017.

We at Tieto will be one of the first service providers to run it in production scale. 

Who will benefit from Azure Stack? 

The rise of cloud age has changed the way applications are developed, but for some businesses and organisations, making use of applications that run on public clouds is not possible, due to concerns over data privacy, latency, compliance or other reasons.

Azure Stack looks set to change all that, as customers will be able to make use of public features offered by Azure, but with the ability to maintain and control them in a private cloud environment.

Tieto customers in Finland, Sweden and Norway will soon be able to reap the benefits of Azure Stack through our secure Nordic data centres via Tieto OneCloud – a multi-cloud solution enabling faster, more secure and more agile business.

This will be especially useful for public sector organisations, and all others where secure, standardised solutions across public and private clouds are crucial, and where regulatory compliance requirements are high. 

More choice and flexibility for a customer

The introduction of Azure Stack to our product offering will enable Tieto to give our customers even more choice and flexibility when it comes to choosing a hybrid cloud solution. With many of our customers being multinational, introducing Azure Stack will give them the ability to choose where data is located, and make it easier to abide by country-specific laws regarding data protection and privacy.

Through the use of templates for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) - a tool that enables users to deploy, manage and monitor the various aspects of the infrastructure that makes up their cloud applications - we can make it easy for customers to deploy applications on both the public and private clouds.

We at Tieto are eagerly awaiting the launch of Azure Stack to add further capabilities to our private cloud offerings and ensuring that customers can start fully benefiting from their existing Azure investments.

See this one minute video, featuring a viewpoint on the new opportunities by Mikko Vuorikoski, Director in Valtori, Government ICT Centre of Finland.  

I also recommend you to download our whitepaper and discover how you can reap the benefits of Azure and Azure Stack as part of Tieto OneCloud.

This article originally appeared on perspectives.tieto.com.