Organizations of all sizes are accelerating their digital transformation to leverage cloud-connected experiences and capabilities across diverse use cases. Whether processing data at the source, running mission-critical applications, or ensuring regulatory compliance, extending these capabilities across cloud and edge is essential. However, a significant challenge they face is in maintaining centralized control while reliably deploying these capabilities across a globally distributed footprint.

Microsoft Azure’s adaptive cloud approach addresses this challenge by unifying siloed teams, distributed sites, and sprawling systems into a single operations, security, application, and data model. This model enables organizations to leverage cloud-native and AI technologies to work simultaneously across hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud-to-local environments. Enabled by Azure Arc, our adaptive cloud approach delivers simple, secure, and observable solutions for various environments and is supported by a trusted infrastructure services portfolio spanning over 60 public cloud regions, Azure Stack portfolio, and other third-party infrastructure. 

We are honored to be recognized again as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure (DHI) for the second consecutive year. In this recently published report, Gartner placed Microsoft Furthest in Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. 

Customers take advantage of employing an adaptive cloud approach

Azure, with its adaptive cloud approach and infrastructure portfolio spanning cloud and edge, streamlines operations, management, and security for a wide range of customer use cases driven by digital transformation efforts in all industries. For instance, Coles and Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA) illustrate the use of AI and machine learning workloads in retail environments and smelting factories, highlighting the demand in both retail and manufacturing industries. Coles uses AI-optimized infrastructure provided by GPU-enabled Azure Stack HCI and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)-enabled by Azure Arc to offer a superior in-store experience for their customers, which requires local AI inferencing for video. EGA’s need for extremely low latency led them to implement local AI modeling, enhancing the real-time positioning of their smart crane, which is crucial for aluminum casting and boosting manufacturing efficiency. 

“With its seamless hybrid cloud architecture, our new digital manufacturing platform outperforms our previous approach by orders of magnitude in terms of cost efficiency, AI response time, and business agility, allowing us to push the frontiers of our digital ambition.”—Director of Digital Platforms and Infrastructure at EGA. 

Energy producer Uniper runs many power plants in a highly regulated industry where sensitive data, such as operation procedures or maintenance of power plants, cannot be hosted in the public cloud. Access and permissions are also strictly confidential. By adopting Azure Stack HCI enabled by Azure Arc, they can adhere to all their data restrictions and easily manage all the individual deployments in their plan centrally and efficiently through the Azure portal, when integrated with Azure Monitor. Uniper now manages its IT resources uniformly in an integrated overall system, regardless of whether the resources are hosted centrally in the public cloud or locally on-premises. 

Many businesses also need to connect their public cloud operations with local workloads. In the retail industry, DICK’S Sporting Goods deployed Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI to run all their in-store apps with local data processing and centralized DevOps. The company envisioned and developed a “one store” strategy. This allows them to write, deploy, manage, and monitor software across all locations and online. DICK’S Sporting Goods was able to greatly simplify their IT process by using this “build once and deploy anywhere to all stores” strategy. 

As demonstrated by these customer examples, the advantages of employing an adaptive cloud approach are varied and numerous, highlighting: 

• Strengthened security posture across all environments.

• Simplification of overall management. 

• Performance improvement. 

• A reduction in carbon footprint (see also power reduction with Azure Stack HCI). 

By partnering with Microsoft, organizations can achieve reliable, secure, and efficient digital transformation. The distributed, hybrid infrastructure portfolio makes it easy for you to virtualize your workloads and run cloud native apps on-premises. Every solution comes enabled with Azure Arc to seamlessly extend the ecosystem of Azure applications and services to your distributed locations. 

Explore additional Microsoft resources

Read more in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure report Gartner Reprint. 

Additionally, check out Microsoft-validated distributed infrastructure solutions and join us at Microsoft Ignite to learn more about all the new investments we are making in this space.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, Julia Palmer, Jeffrey Hewitt, Tony Harvey, Dennis Smith, Stephanie Bauman, Kevin Ji, 7 October 2024.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

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