New Delhi, Dec 10 (IANS): Microsoft on Thursday announced the general availability of its Azure Hybrid Benefit solution for Linux customers in India.

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps organisations to cut the costs of running workloads in the cloud, Microsoft said.

It helps customers "seamlessly" migrate to on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure.

The solution enables significant reduction in cost of running workloads on-the-cloud by converting existing PAYG (pay-as-you-go) virtual machines (VMs) to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, Microsoft said.

The solution gains significance in view of the fact that businesses face challenges in migrating workload to public cloud due to regulatory and data sovereignty related issues.

This is common in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government.

Also, some workloads, especially those related to edge, require low latency.

Additionally, many organisations have significant on-premises investments that they want to maximise so they choose to modernise on-location datacenters and traditional apps.

This includes in on-premises licenses and subscriptions, and the inability to migrate them to cloud often affects the return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Azure solves this by acknowledging this investment and not charging for subscriptions or licenses again when customers move to the cloud, Microsoft said.

Globally, over 1,500 Linux virtual machines were migrated during the preview period to Azure using the new Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities, enabling significant cost reduction for enterprise running Linux workloads in Azure, the company added.