ROI of Microsoft Azure IaaS

Have you been trying to figure out the ROI of Microsoft Azure IaaS? Here is an infographic presenting the conclusions of a recent study on the financial impact of Microsoft Azure IaaS over five years. The study included data aggregation and interviews with six customers.

The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure IaaS

The 2017 study, “The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure IaaS,” gives insight into both the costs and benefits of large-scale Azure implementation.

Conducted by Forrester Consulting, the study analyzes the return on investment and business impact that several enterprises experienced because they had moved from a primarily on-premises environment to Azure. The companies interviewed come from various industries and locations (global/multinational, North American, and European).

In addition to a 435 percent overall return on an Azure IaaS investment, the businesses also experienced:

Reduced data center and outsourcing costs.
Website scale and performance improvements.
Ease of experimentation through virtualized environments.
Developer and tester improvements.

Three Reasons to Migrate to Microsoft Azure IaaS

So what’s the case to be made to the C-Suite? There are many, but I will give you the most important three.

Lower your total cost of ownership

Move your on-premises workloads to Azure to lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) — get cost advantages from economies of scale, use flexible compute options in Azure to right-size, and optimize resource utilization. Save even more with offers like Azure Reserved VM Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit. Optimize your cloud resources and manage your budget with free Azure Cost Management.

Take advantage of a secure, reliable, and global infrastructure

Achieve global scale across 42 announced regions, more than any cloud provider. Take advantage of your infrastructure’s industry-leading availability, disaster recovery, and SLA options. Rely on the cloud with the most comprehensive compliance coverage. Detect and mitigate threats with a built-in, centralized view of all your Azure resources.

Adopt the cloud with low-friction

Simplify and accelerate your Azure adoption initiatives with comprehensive technical resources and process guidance customized to your workloads. Use tools and solutions from Microsoft and an ecosystem of system integrators and managed service providers to help meet your needs—regardless of where you are in your cloud migration.

VMware (On-Premises) vs. Azure

You can gain significant TCO efficiencies by migrating VMware environments to Azure:

Moving to Azure reduces hardware, operations, and virtualization software costs
Azure Reserved VM Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit offers to provide further savings
Once on Azure, customers can access tools to optimize and modernize workloads, unlocking even more significant savings

Microsoft Azure provides a frictionless approach to moving VMware virtual machines to Azure, enabling you to reap significant TCO benefits. Gain from economies of scale, use tools to optimize resource utilization, and take advantage of flexible computing options in Azure. Save even more with offers like Azure Reserved VM Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit (for Windows Server workloads), all while taking advantage of first-class, first-party support for your Microsoft workloads.

For example, for a typical customer running 500 Windows VMs on VMware vSphere on-premises, TCO can be over $5.5M over three years. Supporting this many systems incurs vast expenses across hardware, physical data centers, and IT labor. By migrating to Azure, you can take advantage of immediate savings in hardware and data center costs and benefit from optimized IT management and access to first-class single-vendor support.

Migrating to Azure or building new deployments in Azure enables you to take advantage of offers like Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Hybrid Benefit. If the VMware customer in this example used Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, the organization could save up to 84 percent over the total cost of running on-premises.

Are you interested in learning more about the potential ROI that could be realized by shifting some or all of your management and operations to Azure?