Gartner® recently published its 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (CIPS) report. For the ninth consecutive year, Microsoft was named a Leader, and for the first time placed furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis.
For years, we’ve understood the industry has trusted Gartner Magic Quadrant reports to provide a holistic review of cloud providers’ capabilities.
Today, we face an uncertain global economy, and as customers consider migrating and modernizing their IT environments, they’re turning to the cloud experts they can trust. Our goal is to be that trusted expert with the most comprehensive cloud platform our customers can rely on to manage their infrastructure and modernize their digital estates, freeing them up to focus on what they do best—create, innovate, and differentiate.
We’re honored by this placement in the Gartner report but know there is more to do, particularly as our customers navigate ongoing uncertainties. As they continue to prioritize cloud investments to build resiliency, we’re committed to making continuous improvements and investments to meet their needs.
From cloud to edge: We help customers innovate anywhere
Our long-standing hybrid and multicloud approach is unique in empowering organizations from any industry, wherever they are in their cloud journey, and for whatever use cases they can dream up, to achieve more with Microsoft Azure.
This approach has long enabled our customers to control and manage their sprawling IT assets, ensure consistency, and meet regulatory and sovereignty requirements. Now, as customers leverage the cloud to build new products and offerings that help them stay agile and competitive, Azure and solutions like Azure Arc help organizations innovate anywhere.
Azure Arc operates as a bridge extending across the Azure platform by allowing applications and services the flexibility to run across datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments. Customers across industries including financial services, retail, consumer goods, and manufacturing are realizing the benefits of Azure Arc to address their unique business needs.
Our investments in Azure Arc continue. At Microsoft Build this year, we announced any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-conformant Kubernetes cluster connected through Azure Arc is now a supported deployment target for Azure application services.
In August, we announced the public preview of Microsoft Dev Box, a managed service that enables developers to create on-demand, high-performance, secure, ready-to-code, project-specific workstations in the cloud so they can work and innovate anywhere. And, more recently at Microsoft Ignite, we announced the availability of Arc-enabled SQL Server and new deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Services enabled by Arc, so customers can run containerized apps regardless of their location.
To help our customers optimize their cloud investments, we have pricing benefits and offers, like Azure Hybrid Benefit, providing a way to use existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on the cloud with no additional cost. We also understand customers may need additional help to ensure workloads remain secure and protected with hybrid flexibility as you move.
Earlier this month, we announced the expansion of Azure Hybrid Benefit to include AKS. Now our customers can deploy the Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server in their own datacenters or edge environments at no additional cost. This ensures a consistent, managed Kubernetes experience from cloud to edge for both Windows and Linux containers.
I am always inspired by the ways our customers use our solutions to do more with less, and at the same time, overcome longstanding security and governance challenges.
Performance, scale, and mission-critical capability for all applications and workloads
We continuously invest to make Azure the best place for customers to run their mission-critical workloads, like SAP. Because of offerings like Azure Center for SAP Solutions, an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage SAP workloads on Azure, we’ve become the platform of choice for SAP apps on the cloud.
We’re also making significant investments to support our customers’ largest Windows Server and SQL Server migration and modernization projects, up to 2.5 times more than previous investments1. This will provide even more migration support in two ways: partner assistance with planning and moving workloads, and Azure credits that offset transition costs during the move to Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database.
Global reach and expansion to meet digital sovereignty needs
As the cloud provider with the most datacenter regions—60+ worldwide—we also have a deep commitment to infrastructure expansion for our customers around the world. This year, we launched datacenters in Sweden and Qatar and will launch 10 more regions over the next year.
We also recently launched Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty for government and public sector customers, designed to meet heightened requirements for data residency, privacy, access control, and operational compliance in cloud and hybrid environments.
Microsoft Cloud and Azure help customers unlock business potential
At Microsoft, we have been through our own digital transformation. We brought products like Microsoft Office to the cloud, and we draw from that experience to empower customers to achieve more through the cloud. We understand the power and promise of technology to help unlock an organization’s potential—for employees, customers, industries, and even society more broadly.
Today Microsoft Azure customers come in all shapes and sizes—from startups to space stations, hybrid to cloud native—and are increasingly capitalizing on the value of the full Microsoft Cloud to enable continuous innovation with integrated solutions.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a great example of an organization that chose to migrate its SAP solutions and other resources to Microsoft Azure to improve operations and boost fan engagement. Azure enabled them to spend less time managing technology and focus more on generating fan-centric experiences that bring together business, game, and fan data to enhance the way people can enjoy interacting with the NBA.
Using Azure DevOps and Azure Kubernetes Service, Ernst and Young Global Limited (EY) built more agile practices and shifted into a rolling product-delivery approach for software and services. Now, they’re developing and deploying solutions faster and with more confidence across a wide range of environments.
And global pharmaceutical company Sanofi overcame the limitations of its on-premises infrastructure by adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. They chose Azure as their cloud platform, gaining the speed, agility, and reliability necessary for innovation.
No matter where our customers are in their journey, whether they are migrating, modernizing, or creating new applications in the cloud for their customers, we are here to help them achieve their goals today and empower every organization to build for the future.
Learn more
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, 19 October 2022, Raj Bala, Dennis Smith, Kevin Ji, David Wright, and Miguel Angel Borrega.
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1 based on project eligibility through the Azure Migration and Modernization Program.
