Azure Local in Switzerland: Sovereign Cloud on Your Premises

Azure Local is billed as a subscription per processor core per month through your Azure invoice. Added to that are the validated hardware, which you purchase or finance, and our managed service fee for operations, monitoring and support. You only pay for the cores you activate and scale up as needed. In an initial consultation we analyse your workloads and provide a transparent quote with no grey areas.

For a typical SME we plan 6 to 12 weeks from planning to production, depending on hardware lead times and the number of workloads to migrate. The phases: assessment and sizing, hardware procurement, cluster setup, migration of virtual machines and handover to operations. We work in clearly defined steps so your day-to-day business continues without interruption during the migration.

Operations, monitoring, updates and support for your entire Azure Local cluster. Core services include proactive monitoring, patch management for hardware and platform, a security baseline and a personal service manager with monthly reporting. Additional modules such as backup operations, disaster recovery or extended capacity management can be added as needed. What is included and what is not is defined in the contract. No grey areas, no surprises.

When your data must not leave your premises, your applications need minimal latency, or sites have to keep running without a stable internet connection. Typical cases are regulated industries, production environments and business-critical systems with strict data residency requirements. For everything else, the public cloud usually remains the more economical choice. In the assessment we take an honest look at which workloads belong where, instead of simply selling you hardware.

Your data resides exclusively on your own hardware in your data center. Only management and telemetry data flows to the Azure cloud, never your business data. At the same time, cloud-grade security mechanisms apply locally: encryption by default, Defender integration and central security policies via Azure Arc. We configure the environment according to Microsoft reference architecture and align it with Swiss data protection legislation.

In three phases: First, the assessment, where we analyse your workloads, define the target architecture and size the hardware. Second, setup and migration: we install the cluster, connect it to Azure and migrate your virtual machines step by step. Third, ongoing operations with monitoring, updates and a personal service manager. At every stage you know where the project stands and what comes next.

Your virtual machines yes, your server hardware in most cases no. Azure Local runs on validated hardware approved by Microsoft for the platform. We migrate existing workloads from VMware or Hyper-V to the new cluster using established tools. If you already run Azure Stack HCI: that is the predecessor of Azure Local, and existing clusters are upgraded via update. We review your starting point in the assessment.