How Azure cloud can help businesses do more with less

Whether in-housing or outsourcing, tech decision makers are under more pressure than ever before to drive better business outcomes on leaner budgets. In fact, recent research conducted by Ensono across 500 senior tech decision makers highlights that 84% have seen their budgets fail to grow, or actually decline, compared to previous years. These cuts can be significant. Of those who have seen budgets decline, 71% had been hit with a cut of up to 20%.

Despite these challenges, organizations remain committed to investing in cloud technology. Despite the budgetary pressures highlighted by this research, 88% of IT decision-makers said they are still planning migration and transformation programmes in the next 24 months.

So why are businesses continuing with their cloud journey?

Migration

Migrating to the cloud is an unparalleled way to drive growth, innovation, and secure competitive advantage for your business. Organizations can see immediate savings on infrastructure and energy costs, with Azure users seeing an average of 16% savings on direct infrastructure-related costs when migrating to Azure cloud.

Cloud migration means a business is no longer restricted by securing and maintaining a physical footprint in a datacentre. It offers organizations scalability that is simply not possible in on-premise environments. In a matter of days or weeks, a business can roll out a new application, modernize it and get it up and running globally. And as it grows, the cloud grows with it: customers can automatically scale up and scale down compute resources, cutting excessive expenditure on cloud and building a sustainable budget to match the evolving needs of the organization.

Migrating to the cloud also offers organizations a way to build a more resilient IT operation. A recent IDC study found that Azure Sit Recovery and Azure Backup enabled businesses to lower unplanned downtime, reduce risk and ultimately boost productivity by up to 93%. As a result, organizations are better placed to continuously innovate for their clients, and secure better business outcomes to weather the economic storm.

Optimization

Pressure on budgets is putting more scrutiny on IT spend than ever before. This is having an impact on planning for cloud migration programmes, with businesses looking to realize the benefits of cloud and drive cost savings at the same time. Ensono research makes clear that despite pressure on budgets, 37% IT leaders are investing or increasing investment in technology. Realizing the benefits of cloud hinges on optimization of your workloads. The goal should be focusing your cloud spending to deliver on what matters most to your business and rapidly optimizing costs.

This rapid cost optimization can be achieved when leaders are able to easily identify the resources they are using and therefore those that are running idle or unused. Through this, they can understand which ones to shut down and, crucially, have full visibility on the savings of doing so.

At its heart, the cloud is fundamentally about a new approach to IT architecture. Rather than having to take a universal approach for all your workloads and applications, the cloud allows you to be as granular as you need. You can define the right compute service for your individual application, reserving instances for workloads with consistent needs and configuring autoscaling to ensure you can dynamically scale as workload requirements change.

“In the face of changing markets and constantly evolving economic pressures, organizations are looking to stand out from their competitors and accelerate growth. Azure is well placed to help businesses to rise to the challenge and find new and innovative ways to do more with less. From migration, through to optimizing cloud investment, and re-investing savings, Azure helps to future-proof a business to adapt and thrive as markets change around it. This lets you realize the value of your IT, cutting cost, disruption and risk every step of the way.”

Microsoft

With Microsoft’s full transparency on billing and line by line breakdown of costs, organizations that optimize can make significant savings on Azure cloud. According to Forrester, organizations migrating Windows Server to Azure see a 478% 3-year return on investment (ROI) and can save up to $10 million in avoided on-premises infrastructure and staff costs.

Evolution

Crucially, realising the ROI from cloud rests on feeding cost savings into the rest of the business. Monthly cost savings should be funnelled into an innovation pipeline for re-investment in the rest of the business. This is the real game-changer of cloud, and the key to staying ahead of the competition.

Every organization’s cloud journey will, undoubtedly, look different. Significant upfront investment in modernizing applications for cloud is not always possible, particularly for businesses feeling the current strain on budgets. Azure cloud is a platform to support businesses on this journey, progressively optimizing how workloads are running and creating cost savings that can be invested back into business innovation and driving growth.

The cloud is truly the place to find the latest innovative technology.

Ensono research found that 71% of IT decision makers view cloud tech as a priority for businesses to stay innovative in 2023-24.​ The Microsoft ecosystem gives business access to cutting edge technology, whether it is Azure OpenAI or Azure Quantum. In Azure cloud, enterprises are, ultimately, well placed to achieve a more resilient, efficient and innovative enterprise, that lets them do more with less.