Dean Paron details Microsoft’s recognition as a leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, focusing on how Azure Arc and Azure Local empower customers with unified cloud management, governance, and innovation.

Microsoft Recognized as Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure

Microsoft has once again been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, marking the third consecutive year for this achievement. This recognition reflects Azure’s impact in helping organizations run workloads seamlessly across hybrid, edge, multicloud, and sovereign environments.

Azure’s Adaptive Cloud: Built on Azure Arc and Azure Local

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach is designed for organizations that require operational flexibility across diverse environments. Core technologies include:

  • Azure Arc: Extends Azure management tools to any environment—on-premises, edge, or other clouds—via Azure Resource Manager. It unifies operations and enables services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure IoT Operations, and Azure AI Video Indexer across platforms.
  • Azure Local: Leverages Azure Arc to run Azure-native services in customer-owned environments, from virtual machines to AKS, supporting scenarios demanding sovereignty, compliance, and isolated operations. This aligns with Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud strategy.

Together, Azure Arc and Azure Local provide unified governance, management, and consistent security across distributed IT landscapes, helping organizations scale efficiently and securely.

Real-World Impact Across Industries

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach has delivered significant results for a variety of organizations:

  • Publix Employees Federal Credit Union (PEFCU): Consolidated operations with Azure Arc and Azure Local, reducing disaster recovery time and enabling greater innovation focus for engineers.
  • Delta Dental of California: Modernized its core systems with containerized workloads, improving system performance, uptime, and compliance.
  • CDW: Migrated 800 virtual machines to Azure Local, doubling SQL performance and strengthening security and governance via Azure Policy and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
  • Coles and Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA): Scaled operations with Azure Local, utilizing GPU-enabled AI workloads for analytics and customer experience improvements.

These examples demonstrate Azure’s ability to unify operations, enhance security, and enable innovative workloads irrespective of location or compliance needs.

Building the Future Together

While recognition from Gartner is an important milestone, Microsoft remains focused on continual investment in making Azure adaptive, secure, and capable of supporting organizations’ innovation goals. The ongoing partnership with customers inspires further development of cloud infrastructure technologies.

Learn More

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, 2025. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications. See the full 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant report for more information.

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