As organizations move to the cloud,
they often have servers on‑premise that they would need to still protect.
Imagine taking cloud capabilities to those on‑premise servers.
Well, that is possible with Azure Arc.
Azure Arc lets you manage your Windows and Linux physical servers or
virtual machines that are hosted outside of Azure.
These can be either on your corporate network,
a different datacenter or even a different cloud provider.
When you use Azure Arc on those servers,
you can make use of various cloud operations just as you would
natively within an Azure Virtual Machine.
So let's take a look at what these operations are.
The first type of operation that you have is the
ability to govern your virtual machine.
This ultimately allows you to assign different types of Azure
policies to audit different settings within the machine. From a
protection capability, Azure Arc enables you to make use of
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
You can also leverage Microsoft Sentinel to collect security‑related
events and correlate them with other data sources. From a
configuration point of view, Azure Arc allows you to make use of
Azure Automation so that you can automate frequent and time consuming
management tasks by making use of various runbooks that would run
with PowerShell or Python.
Another important benefit is Update Management. Using Update
Management, you can manage your operating system updates for both
Windows and Linux servers and extend them by making use of Azure
Automanage. Another benefit that you have is the ability to link
Arc‑enabled virtual machine extensions to those non‑Azure machines. And
then from a monitor point of view,
you can leverage VM insights to monitor your operating system
performance and discover any type of applications or processes that have
dependencies on other resources. And then finally, making use of Log
Analytics to collect various types of data,
such as events, performance, and so forth.
So here you can see that Azure Arc really gives you quite an extensive range of capabilities for non‑Azure machines.