One year ago at Microsoft Ignite, a major shift was announced: Azure would no longer be a public cloud story alone, but a platform that can run anywhere. From datacenter to edge, from factory floor to government network. That vision was named Azure Local, and a lot has changed since.

During the recent DataON Community Session, Alan Kerr, Director Adaptive Cloud at Microsoft, reflected on that first year. What started as a repositioning of Azure Stack HCI has grown into a strategic pillar within Microsoft’s hybrid strategy. And one thing was clear from his session: this is only the beginning.

From experiment to foundation

The past year has been all about consolidation. Microsoft brought the fragmented worlds of Stack HCI, Stack Edge, Stack Hub and Operator Nexus together under one unified label: Azure Local. With that, the outdated idea that “edge” is limited to small, isolated devices disappeared. Instead, Azure Local has become one consistent platform with shared infrastructure, security, and management models.

That makes Azure Local the practical expression of the adaptive cloud: a single environment that scales from a compact edge node to a full datacenter and behaves like Azure. As Kerr put it: “We run Azure on premises.”

The strength of maturity

The last twelve months were not only about adding new features, but also about investing heavily in quality and reliability. Microsoft focused on two major initiatives that highlight this shift: the Secure Future Initiative (SFI) and the Quality Excellence Program.

This focus was necessary. The early phase brought rapid releases, but also growing pains. Updates and migrations sometimes demanded more attention than customers were used to. That phase is now behind us. The move to Azure Core OS—the same foundation used in Windows Server 2025 and the Azure fabric—delivers greater stability, higher performance and a platform that evolves in sync with Azure innovation.

This creates the solid, secure foundation needed for what comes next: the next generation of services, from AI to data-driven workloads.

The new standard for hybrid IT

While many organisations are still searching for the right balance between cloud and on-premises, Azure Local brings that balance to life. It allows workloads to run wherever they are technically or legally best suited, without compromising on security or operational consistency.

This model is relevant far beyond regulated industries. It also enables companies to process AI and data closer to the source. Manufacturing plants, logistics hubs and healthcare organisations all benefit from lower latency and strict control over data.

Azure Local is also the engine behind Microsoft’s sovereign cloud strategy in Europe. It provides the underlying layer that delivers the Azure experience in a fully controlled, local or regionally compliant environment.

What to expect as we head toward Ignite

Alan Kerr’s session also offered a look at what’s coming next. Ignite 2025 will be the moment where many of the past year’s promises become real-world, production-ready capabilities.

• Arc portability: After the first step with Azure Migrate, moving workloads between Azure Local clusters and Azure will become even simpler.
  
• Confidential Compute: New capabilities will help protect workloads against compromised accounts or insider threats, an essential next step in a zero trust model.
  
• AI integration: Early previews of AI Foundry Local show how organisations will run language models and inference locally, close to their data, without sending anything to the cloud.
  
• Full Azure Portal integration: Storage, networking and cluster management will increasingly align with the cloud experience.
  

Ignite will not mark a change in direction, but an acceleration. The path forward is clear: a seamless, secure hybrid infrastructure where AI, data and applications can move freely between cloud and local environments.

Our role? At XCES, we translate this vision into actionable architectures, realistic migration paths and management models that fit the European realities of privacy, regulation and data sovereignty. Curious what Azure Local can mean for your organisation? Reach out to our team, we’re here to help you move forward!