The cloud is no longer some distant, separate place. Yes, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google maintain unimaginably vast expanses of servers in cloud data centers around the world – as do thousands of SaaS providers. But those clouds and the services they deliver have become so entwined with customers’ on-prem operations, they’re now vital components of almost every enterprise IT estate.
This intermingling takes many forms. For starters, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now enable you to snap off a piece of their platforms in the form of racks of managed servers that live in your data center, preloaded with the same software that powers public clouds.
