On Thursday, Microsoft announced the availability of its Azure Hybrid Benefit solution for Linux customers based in India.

Azure Hybrid Benefit, a licensing benefit, helps organizations in cutting the costs down of running workloads in the cloud platform, said Microsoft.

Azure Hybrid Benefit helps customers in migrating 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 seamlessly.

The solution grants significant reduction in cost of development of running workloads on the cloud by converting existing PAYG (pay-as-you-go) VMs to Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS) billing, said Microsoft.

Gaining significant in view of the fact that businesses face challenges in migrating workload to public cloud due to regulatory, and data sovereignty, the solution faces issues.

It is common in highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and government.

Moreover, some workloads, especially those which are related to edge, require low latency.

In addition, many organizations have significant on-premise investments that they want to maximize for choosing to modernize on-location datacenters, and traditional apps.

It includes in on-premises licenses, and subscription, and the inability to migrating them to cloud often affects the return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Azure solves this through acknowledgement of this investment, and not charging for subscription or licenses again when customers move to cloud, said Microsoft.

Globally, there are more than 1,500 Linux Virtual machines, which 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, said Microsoft.