Forrester Consulting interviewed decision-makers from organizations using Azure Arc with cloud-based management services to manage their IT assets.
As businesses continue to adapt to changing market demands, running modern workloads requires the rapid integration of AI from digital to physical estate. Managing enterprise-level infrastructure and applications across environments needs to be simplified with centralized visualization and control across IT assets.
Azure Arc extends the Azure platform to standardize governance, security, and orchestration for applications in multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge environments, enabling IT teams to have a common operations approach and focus on strategic priorities such as modernization, and AI initiatives.
For the 2025 commissioned study The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Azure Arc With Cloud-Based Management Services, Forrester Consulting interviewed decision-makers from organizations using Azure Arc with cloud-based management services to manage their IT assets. These organizations span across manufacturing, cloud solutions providers, and the public sector. The consolidated data from the interviewees’ experiences shows that use of Azure Arc with cloud-based management services, demonstrated the following benefits:
- 304% return on investment (ROI) over a period of three years with payback in less than six months.
- 30% gain in IT operations productivity.
- 50% reduction in risk of security breach.
- 10% licensing savings with on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server pay-as-you-go as well as a 30% reduction in fees for extended security updates.
- 15% reduction in spending on third-party solutions and tools.
Azure Arc addresses key challenges organizations face in centrally managing their diverse and vast IT infrastructure, such as gaining visibility across infrastructure, increased administrative costs with multiple tools, difficulty in enforcing security standards, and costly extended security update processes.
A unified approach to management and governance enabled by Azure Arc
According to the Forrester study, organizations realized a 30% gain in IT operations productivity by leveraging a unified approach to managing IT infrastructure enabled by Azure Arc. IT operations personnel were able to get a complete view of asset inventory, standardization of security and governance using cloud-based management services, automation of manual processes such as hot patching, and reduction in time taken for context switching when using multiple third-party tools. IT operations teams are now empowered to apply best practices consistently and spend more time on value-add strategic initiatives as Azure Arc has reduced operational toil while managing diverse environments.
Azure Arc saves us approximately 75% of the time for updates and rollouts for our many on-premises Windows Servers.
—HEAD ARCHITECT OF INFRASTRUCTURE AND SECURITY, MANUFACTURING
Cost savings and reduction in security risks
Organizations participating in the Forrester study that invested in Azure Arc and cloud-based management services from Azure not only achieved a more streamlined way to manage day-to-day activities such as updates, management of configurations, policies, and permissions, but also realized savings due to automation and better visibility of licensing. Implementing a pay-as-you-go pricing model for on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server, similar to Azure’s consumption pricing model, resulted in savings of 10% compared to capacity-based pricing. Additionally, the simplified procurement process, which eliminated third-party vendor markups for extended security updates, reduced fees by 30%.
The on-premises licensing model is now like cloud utilization. For example, we can turn down SQL servers that we are not needing on weekends or after hours, and don’t get charged for that time period.
—SOLUTIONS MANAGER, CLOUD SOLUTIONS PROVIDER
Organizations strengthened their security posture by using Microsoft’s observability and security services like Azure Monitor, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, and Microsoft Sentinel across their IT estate. This approach helped them to identify assets that did not meet security standards, standardize security policies and threat detection, and lower the response time for security incidents, thereby reducing the risk of security breaches by 50%.
In our security operations center, instead of getting three different workspaces each with all these different signals, now all the telemetry is flowing into one. And so, it allows us to better do threat hunting to recognize threats when they’re occurring on the network.
—SOLUTIONS MANAGER, CLOUD SOLUTIONS PROVIDER
With standardized use of cloud-based management services, organizations were able to reduce their dependence on third party tools, leading to savings from deprecating tools by up to 15%.
Azure Arc: The backbone of Azure’s adaptive cloud approach
Azure Arc provides organizations with the next level of modularity, integration, and simplicity to their IT and OT teams. Several of our customers are leveraging Azure Arc to embrace Azure’s adaptive cloud approach, enabling them to move beyond traditional boundaries, standardize management and operations across distributed sites, and integrate cloud-native and AI technologies to work simultaneously across hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, distributed computing, and IoT to accomplish key business outcomes in industries such as Manufacturing, Retail, Transportation and Logistics, Sports and Live Experiences, and Government.
How customers are accelerating innovation with the adaptive cloud approach
Chevron is reimagining monitoring of physical operations by analyzing data locally at remote facilities at the edge while still maintaining a centralized cloud-based management plane with Azure Arc. COCD (SANTÉ QUÉBEC) is managing its growing healthcare network by eliminating silos and taking a holistic approach to managing cybersecurity and other digital services using Azure Arc and security services from Microsoft. Louisiana State Government is optimizing value from operational investments by adopting Azure Arc and adaptive cloud approach to gain full visibility and control while accommodating legacy infrastructure. LALIGA can now innovate for the ultimate fan experience using Azure Arc to extend Azure to the edge from a single platform, no matter where the workload is located, improving security by centralizing management of its on-premises and cloud environments, and becoming more efficient and strategic in its operations by taking advantage of AI.
Learn more
Download the full study: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Azure Arc With Cloud-Based Management Services.
