IT estates are becoming more complex, as they span multiple terrains from on-prem to edge, with hybrid cloud being the norm. Managing these domains and hybrid environments can prove challenging, when in fact, the right cloud strategy should deliver business advantages rather than challenges.

We believe Azure Arc is a game changer and we’re using it to help clients make better IT and business decisions, as well as unlock more business value from the cloud. Azure Arc extends Azure management and services across all types of infrastructure, whether on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid cloud, or at the edge. We’re using Arc to unify hybrid infrastructures for clients, to simplify and standardize infrastructure management, to accelerate migration decisions and to reduce costs.

Not only does Arc make management simpler, it also allows clients to extend the adoption of cloud practices like DevOps, to enable Azure security capabilities across hybrid infrastructure and to innovate everywhere safe in the knowledge their data is secure.

Making better migration decisions

Beyond the obvious standardization benefits, Arc will help organizations to make the right decisions about cloud migrations. Using Arc you can gather the workload data and uncover insights to decide where your workloads should run – on-prem, in Azure, in another third party cloud or at the edge. This insight driven approach saves significant time and reduces the costs of migration.

“We can identify the workloads that make sense to move, and those that don’t, so we’re pursuing the projects that have the highest business value, for example developing modern apps that were previously precluded by old legacy platforms.”

Clients should be running workloads wherever it makes most sense for them to run, while still being able to use Azure services. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re finding we can bring significantly more value to clients by leveraging the power of Arc to uncover deeper, more valuable insights.

It gets really exciting when we show a client the ROI for moving a particular workload. This is particularly powerful in helping clients to make the right migration decisions faster – decisions that will benefit their business. We’re able to show a guaranteed business case for moving a workload, so our clients are now choosing to move workloads knowing that they’re basing their decisions on sound insights we’re drawing out from Arc.

Extending the reach of cloud services

If you’re comfortable with Azure, you should be comfortable with Arc. Bringing consistency across hybrid infrastructure will deliver productivity gains and reduced risk.

We love how Arc enables so many Azure services to be extended to all IT infrastructure. As an example, we’re working with a client to use Microsoft Azure Security Center services for on-prem data workloads, so we can apply advanced threat protection and vulnerability assessment for hybrid infrastructures. With Azure Arc and our own evolving tools and processes, clients can standardize security management, as well as take advantage of everything Arc brings to them, without having to do the heavy lifting.

Wherever it makes sense for your workloads to run, you can still leverage the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud. Not only that, our Azure-backed managed services now extend to support managed services for on-premises capabilities.

Learn more about Avanade’s cloud services that will help your organization drive business value.