Organizations in highly regulated industries such as government, defense, financial services, healthcare, and energy often operate under strict security and compliance requirements and across distributed locations, some with limited or no connectivity to public cloud.
Leveraging advanced capabilities, including AI, in the face of this complexity can be time-consuming and resource intensive.
Azure Local, enabled by Azure Arc, offers simplicity. Azure Local’s distributed infrastructure extends cloud services and security across distributed locations, including customer-owned on-premises environments. Through Azure Arc, customers benefit from a single management experience and full operational control that is consistent from cloud to edge.
Available in preview to pre-qualified customers, Azure Local with disconnected operations extends these capabilities even further – enabling organizations to deploy, manage, and operate cloud-native infrastructure and services in completely disconnected or air-gapped networks.
What is disconnected operations?
Disconnected operations is an add-on capability of Azure Local, delivered as a virtual appliance, that enables the deployment and lifecycle management of your Azure Local infrastructure and Arc-enabled services, without any dependency on a continuous cloud connection.
Key Benefits
- Consistent Azure Experience: You can operate your disconnected environment using the same tools you already know - Azure Portal, Azure CLI and ARM Templates extended through a local control plane.
- Built-in Azure Services: Through Azure Arc, you can deploy, update, and manage Azure services such as Azure Local VMs, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), etc.
- Data Residency and Control: You can govern and keep data within your organization's physical and legal jurisdiction to meet data residency, operational autonomy, and technological isolation requirements.
Key Use Cases
Azure Local with disconnected operations unlocks a range of impactful use cases for regulated industries:
- Government and Defense: Running sensitive government workloads and classified data more securely in air-gapped and tactical environments with familiar Azure management and operations.
- Manufacturing: Deploying and managing mission-critical applications like industrial process automation and control systems for real-time optimizations in more highly secure environments with zero connectivity.
- Financial Services: Enhanced protection of sensitive financial data with real time data analytics and decision making, while ensuring compliance with strict regulations in isolated networks.
- Healthcare: Running critical workloads with a need for real-time processing, storing and managing sensitive patient data with the increased levels of privacy and security in disconnected environments
- Energy: Operating critical infrastructure in isolated environments, such as electrical production and distribution facilities, oil rigs, or remote pipelines.
Here is an example of how disconnected operations for Azure Local can provide mission critical emergency response and recovery efforts by providing essential services when critical infrastructure and networks are unavailable.
Core Features and capabilities
Simplified Deployment and Management
Download and deploy the disconnected operations virtual appliance on Azure Local Premier Solutions through a streamlined user interface.
Create and manage Azure Local instances using the local control plane, with the same tooling experience as Azure.
Offline Updates
The monthly update package includes all the essential components: the appliance, Azure Local software, AKS, and Arc-enabled service agents. You can update and manage the entire Azure Local instance using the local control plane without an internet connection.
Monitoring Integration
You can monitor your Azure Local instances and VMs using external monitoring solutions like SCOM by installing custom management packs and monitor AKS Clusters through 3rd party open-source solutions like Prometheus and Grafana.
Run Mission-Critical Workloads – Anytime, Anywhere
Azure Local VMs
You can run VMs with flexible sizing, support for custom VM images, and high availability through storage replication and automatic failover – all managed through the local Azure interface.
AI & Containers with AKS
You can use disconnected AI containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Local to deploy and manage AI applications in disconnected scenarios where data residency and operational autonomy is required. AKS enables the deployment and management of containerized applications such as AI agents and models, deep learning frameworks, and related tools, which can be leveraged for inferencing, fine-tuning, and training in isolated networks. AKS also automates resource scaling, allowing for the dynamic addition and removal of container instances to more efficiently utilize hardware resources, including GPUs, which are critical for AI workloads. This provides consistent Azure experience in managing Kubernetes clusters and AI workloads with the same tooling and processes in connected environments.
Get Started: Resources and Next Steps
Microsoft is excited to announce the upcoming preview of Disconnected Operations for Azure Local in Q3 ‘CY25 for both Commercial and Government Cloud customers.
- To Learn more, please visit Disconnected operations for Azure Local overview (preview) - Azure Local
- Ready to participate? Get Qualified! or contact your Microsoft account team.
Please also check out this session at Microsoft Build https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/BRK195 by Mark Russinovich, one of the most influential minds in cloud computing. His insights into the latest Azure innovations, the future of cloud architecture and computing, is a must-watch event!
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