Yannick
How does that work?
Traditional approaches to management are focused on per-location maintenance. That does not scale for organizations operating worldwide. You need local IT expertise that, especially at remote sites, often is not there. You depend on physical presence for updates and troubleshooting. And you have no centralized view of what runs across all those locations.
With Azure Local, you manage all locations from a single dashboard in Azure. You see the status of every node, every VM, every workload. Updates are planned and rolled out centrally. Alerts come into one place.
In practice, this means: firmware and software are updated without anyone needing to be physically present. Applications and configurations are managed and deployed as code through Infrastructure as Code, not manually per location. Azure services such as monitoring, policy management, and security run via the cloud but operate on the local infrastructure. And when hardware issues arise, the vendor can directly inspect and ship replacement parts.
One of our clients produces animal feed at locations worldwide, a number of which are truly remote. The IT team in the Netherlands manages all sites from a single management environment. Systems are prepared by Splitbrain and are plug-and-play on arrival.
You manage everything from a single dashboard. No more traveling for updates. Fewer fires to fight thanks to proactive monitoring. But you remain responsible for the workloads. You need to create runbooks. You need to set up escalation procedures.
Many IT managers fear that new technology means extra workload. With Azure Local, the opposite is true. Your team does not need to build specialized local expertise for every site. You do not need to travel for updates. And you have fewer fires to fight because you see problems before they escalate.
That does require an upfront investment. Your team needs Azure skills: training on Azure Arc, Infrastructure as Code, and the management tools of Azure Local. Organizations that do not have that knowledge in-house, or do not want to build it, can outsource management through managed services from Splitbrain.
The question IT managers often ask: can my team run this easily? The answer is yes, provided the implementation is set up properly. That means: clear runbooks, automated monitoring, and a well-defined escalation procedure. Get in touch to discuss what this looks like for your team.
This article is part of the longread Factory of the Future.
Yannick de Koeijer
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