Dell EMC today launched a hybrid cloud platform for businesses that have hybrid clouds based on Microsoft Azure Stack.

The Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack makes it fast for companies to deploy and manage applications across Azure public cloud and on-premises private clouds, with Azure Stack, said Peter Cutts, senior vice president, hybrid cloud platforms, Dell EMC. Customers include enterprises and service providers.

Also today, Dell EMC released details about an IDC study that it commissioned, showing that nearly 80 percent of large organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy and 51 percent already use both public and private cloud.

“The study shows there’s a reason to do both public and private clouds,” Cutts said. “Our turnkey platforms help them deliver that in the simplest way possible.”

The company’s newest cloud platform is built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC Networking. It also integrates Dell EMC backup and encryption technologies.

“One of the things it does as a value-add: it allows a lot of granular control under policy and geo-fencing, providing this as a simple service that can be added as a part of a policy or part of a request,” Cutts said. “It can be stored both locally and remotely.”

Why Microsoft Azure Stack? Dell EMC has a long history partnering with Microsoft, Cutts said.

“Especially when it comes to the cloud. We shipped the industry’s first Microsoft-based hybrid cloud solution in 2015. Sixty-six percent of enterprise servers run on Microsoft platforms, and it’s the fastest growing cloud provider with over 120,000 new customers every month. This hybrid cloud platform will allow our customers to deliver application services in Azure and Azure Stack with our differentiators.”

In addition to data protection and encryption, these differentiators include Dell EMC’s support services throughout the lifecycle of the platform, Cutts said.

The new product builds on Dell’s earlier cloud platforms: Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud.

The former, based on VMware, supports hybrid cloud management in partnership with major cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

The latter connects with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. When apps are built using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they can be deployed on-premises or on any public cloud environment. Pivotal has partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

The adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure will extend to Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, the company said.

Dell EMC commissioned analyst firm IDC to conduct a global survey of 1,000 mid- to large-sized organizations that are using and/or evaluating private and public cloud.

This IDC Cloudview Survey found that 79.7 percent of large organizations (with 1,000 or more employees) report they already have a hybrid cloud strategy. Of these, 51.4 percent already use both public and private cloud infrastructure resources with an additional 29.2 percent expecting to in the next year.

A different study also commissioned by Dell EMC and published last month found that despite paying lip service to “digital transformation,” the majority of senior IT managers at large companies aren’t fully embracing next-generation data center technologies.