kyleikeda breaks down insights from a Forrester TEI study, showing how organizations can leverage Azure’s native tools and AI solutions to optimize cloud costs and drive innovation.

Smarter Cloud, Smarter Spend: How Azure Powers Cost-Efficient Innovation

Organizations today balance the need to innovate with tight cost controls, and cloud spending is a critical concern. This post summarizes key findings from a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by Microsoft, explaining how Azure’s tooling and strategic pricing offers enable organizations to modernize operations and accelerate AI adoption while maintaining cost efficiency.

Cloud Migration: Accelerating Modernization with Azure

Many companies struggle with budget overruns, visibility gaps, and resource inefficiency during cloud migration. Azure addresses these challenges through:

Azure Hybrid Benefit: Optimizes savings with discounts for server licenses and subscriptions during migration and grants hosting and outsourcing benefits.
Azure Reservations: Offers cost savings for committing to specific resources, regions, and periods.
Azure Savings Plan for Compute: Flexible pricing by committing to a fixed hourly spend for a set term.
Microsoft Cost Management & Azure Advisor: Provide real-time insights and recommendations for optimizing resources.
Azure Pricing Calculator: Assists with accurate cost estimation and forecasting.

“Azure reservations and Azure Hybrid Benefit facilitate moving to the cloud. With these offers and better cost management, we are saving 30% to 35%.” – Senior IT Director, Manufacturing

Quantified Impact

25% reduction in cloud spending in the first year using Microsoft tools.
$4.9M in direct savings over three years through optimization tools.
$3.8M additional savings from strategic pricing offers.

AI Adoption: Cost-Effective, Scalable Innovation

With migration complete, organizations look to AI for competitive advantage. Azure supports scalable, cost-effective AI deployment via:

Azure AI Foundry Provisioned Throughput Reservations: Reduces costs for AI workloads compared to hourly pricing.
Cost Management & Azure Advisor: Forecast and optimize AI-related spending.
Strategic Pricing Offers: Provide predictable budgeting for AI initiatives.

“Leveraging Microsoft tools and strategic pricing offers is not only increasing profitability but also putting those savings into more interesting projects like AI with fraud prevention work and the customer experience.” – VP of Analytics Engineering, Financial Services

Additional Benefits

Increased visibility and insights into cloud usage
Improved governance and accountability
24% productivity improvement by Year 3

Outcomes and Takeaways

Cost-efficient, managed cloud migration
Rapid AI adoption enabled by cost savings
Net present value (NPV) of $8.7M over three years
35% reduction in cloud spending in Year 1
Ability to redeploy resources towards high-value, innovative work, such as generative AI projects

“With Microsoft tools, we can focus on higher value projects. Instead of reviewing reports and conducting cost audits, we can build new tools and build with genAI. We can innovate faster.” – Vice President of Analytics Engineering, Financial Services

Explore the full Forrester TEI study for comprehensive insights, customer stories, and detailed financial modeling: Read the full study

Note: Benefits and risks in the study are based on interviews with eight decision-makers and are aggregated to a composite organization.

This post appeared first on “Microsoft Tech Community”. Read the entire article here