As the integer scenery rapidly evolves, AI stands astatine the forefront, driving important innovation crossed industries. However, to afloat harness the powerfulness of AI, businesses indispensable beryllium AI-ready; this means having defined use-cases for their AI apps, being equipped with modernized databases that seamlessly integrate with AI models, and astir importantly, having the close infrastructure successful spot to powerfulness and recognize their AI ambitions. When we speech to our customers, galore person expressed that accepted on-premises systems often autumn abbreviated successful providing the indispensable scalability, stability, and flexibility required for modern AI applications.

A recent Forrester study¹, commissioned by Microsoft, surveyed implicit 300 IT leaders and interviewed representatives from organizations globally to larn astir their acquisition migrating to Azure and if that enhanced their AI impact. The results showed that migrating from on-premises infrastructure to Azure tin enactment AI-readiness successful organizations, with little costs to basal up and devour AI services positive improved flexibility and quality to innovate with AI. Here’s what you should cognize earlier you commencement leveraging AI successful the cloud.

Challenges faced by customers with on-premises infrastructure

Many organizations who attempted to instrumentality AI on-premises encountered important challenges with their existing infrastructure. The apical challenges with on-premises infrastructure cited were:

• Aging and costly infrastructure: Maintaining oregon replacing aging on-premises systems is some costly and complex, diverting resources from strategical initiatives.
• Infrastructure instability: Unreliable infrastructure impacts concern operations and profitability, creating an urgent request for a much unchangeable solution.
• Lack of scalability: Traditional systems often deficiency the scalability required for AI and instrumentality learning (ML) workloads, necessitating important investments for infrequent highest capableness needs.
• High superior costs: The important upfront costs of on-premises infrastructure bounds flexibility and tin beryllium a obstruction to adopting caller technologies.

Forrester’s survey highlights that migrating to Azure efficaciously addresses these issues, enabling organizations to absorption connected innovation and concern maturation alternatively than infrastructure maintenance.

Key Benefits

1. Improved AI-readiness: When asked whether being connected Azure helped with AI-readiness, 75% of survey respondents with Azure infrastructure reported that migrating to the unreality was indispensable oregon importantly reduced barriers to AI and ML adoption. Interviewees noted that the AI services are readily disposable successful Azure, and colocation of information and infrastructure that is billed lone connected depletion helps teams trial and deploy faster with little upfront costs. This was summarized good by an interviewee who was the caput of unreality and DevOps for a banking company:

We didn’t person to spell and physique an AI capability. It’s up there, and astir of our information is successful the unreality arsenic well. And from a hardware-specific standpoint, we don’t person to spell procure peculiar hardware to tally AI models. Azure provides that hardware today.”

—Head of unreality and DevOps for planetary banking institution

2. Cost Efficiency: Migrating to Azure importantly reduces the archetypal costs of deploying AI and the outgo to support AI, compared to on-premises infrastructure. The survey estimates that organizations acquisition fiscal benefits of USD $500 1000 positive implicit 3 years and 15% little costs to support AI/ML successful Azure compared to on-premises infrastructure.
3. Flexibility and scalability to physique and support AI: As mentioned above, deficiency of scalability was a communal situation for survey respondents with on-premises infrastructure arsenic well. Respondents with on-premises infrastructure cited deficiency of scalability with existing systems arsenic a situation erstwhile deploying AI and ML astatine 1.5 times the complaint of those with Azure unreality infrastructure.

• Interviewees shared that migrating to Azure gave them casual entree to caller AI services and the scalability they needed to trial and physique them retired without worrying astir infrastructure. 90% of survey respondents with Azure unreality infrastructure agreed oregon powerfully agreed they person the flexibility to physique caller AI and ML applications. This is compared to 43% of respondents with on-premises infrastructure. A CTO for a healthcare enactment said:

After migrating to Azure each the infrastructure problems person disappeared, and that’s mostly been the occupation erstwhile you’re looking astatine caller technologies historically.”

—CTO for a healthcare organization

They explained that now, “The scalability [of Azure] is unsurpassed, truthful it adds to that standard and reactiveness we tin supply to the organization.” They besides said: “When we were moving on-prem, AI was not arsenic easy accessible arsenic it is from a unreality perspective. It’s a batch much available, accessible, and casual to commencement consuming arsenic well. It allowed the concern to commencement reasoning extracurricular of the container due to the fact that the capabilities were there.”

4. Holistic organizational improvement: Beyond the outgo and show benefits, the survey recovered that migration to Azure accelerated innovation with AI by having an interaction connected the radical astatine each levels of an organization:

• Bottoms-up: skilling and reinvestment successful employees. Forrester has recovered that investing successful employees to physique understanding, skills, and morals is captious to successfully utilizing AI. Both interviewees and survey respondents expressed trouble uncovering skilled resources to enactment AI and ML initiatives astatine their organizations.
  • Migrating to the unreality freed up resources and changed the types of enactment needed, allowing organizations to upskill employees and reinvest resources successful caller initiatives similar AI. A VP of AI for a fiscal services enactment shared: “As we person gone on this journey, we person not reduced the fig of engineers arsenic we person gotten much efficient, but we’re doing more. You could accidental we’ve invested successful AI, but everything we person invested—my full team—none of these radical were caller additions. These are radical we could redeploy due to the fact that we’re doing everything other much efficiently.”

• Top-down: created a larger civilization of innovation astatine organizations. As caller technologies—like AI—disrupt full industries, companies request to excel astatine each levels of innovation to succeed, including embracing platforms and ecosystems that assistance thrust innovation. For interviewees, migrating to the unreality meant that caller resources and capabilities were readily available, making it easier for organizations to instrumentality vantage of caller technologies and opportunities with reduced risk.
  • Survey information indicates that 77% of respondents with Azure unreality infrastructure find it easier to innovate with AI and ML, compared to lone 34% of those with on-premises infrastructure. An enforcement caput of unreality and DevOps for a banking enactment said: “Migrating to Azure changes the mindset from an enactment position erstwhile it comes to innovation, due to the fact that services are easy disposable successful the cloud. You don’t person to spell retired to the marketplace and look for them. If you look astatine AI, primitively lone our information abstraction worked connected it, whereas today, it’s being utilized crossed the enactment due to the fact that we were already successful the unreality and it’s readily available.”

Learn much astir migrating to Azure for AI-readiness

Forrester’s survey underscores the important economical and strategical advantages of migrating to Azure for beryllium AI-ready. Lower costs, accrued innovation, amended assets allocation, and improved scalability marque migration to Azure a wide prime for organizations looking to thrive successful the AI-driven future.

Ready to get started with your migration journey? Here are immoderate resources to larn more:

1. Read the full Forrester TEI study connected migration to Azure for AI-readiness.
2. The solutions that tin enactment your organization’s migration and modernization goals.
3. Our hero offerings that supply funding, unsocial offers, adept support, and champion practices for each use-cases, from migration to innovation with AI.
4. Learn much successful our e-book and video connected however to migrate to innovate.

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Refrences

1. Forrester Consulting The Total Economic Impact™ Of Migrating to Microsoft Azure For AI-Readiness, commissioned by Microsoft, June 2024

The station Harnessing the afloat powerfulness of AI successful the cloud: The economical interaction of migrating to Azure for AI readiness appeared archetypal connected Microsoft Azure Blog.