Improved Operational Stability

Evidence and data. Interviewees across industries reported that migrating VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution materially improved day-to-day operational stability by eliminating fragile legacy workflows, reducing service interruptions, and enabling more resilient cloud-based operations.

• The VP of IT program management at a healthcare provider described how legacy remote access patterns created chronic reliability issues for end users. VPN drop-offs, home network instability, and fragmented access models disrupted workflows. But they said that after moving these dependencies into Azure, reliability improved substantially: “Some of those historic workflows that are frustrating for end users, for instance where an end user doesn’t realize that they’re not connected to the VPN or the VPN is not reliable on their home internet, all those things that cause frustration are being migrated to Azure as we speak.”
  The same interviewee noted the IT team’s overall service responsiveness to end users improved dramatically. Faster remote support and consistent AVS-based tooling contributed to more predictable issue resolution and smoother operations. They said, “[We spend] less than 10 minutes on first-call resolution, which is phenomenal service.”

• The CIO for North America at a financial services institution emphasized the stability gains their organization achieved by shifting a critical workload out of its legacy mainframe-centric environment and into Azure’s managed AVS platform. Offloading the operational burden and relying on Microsoft’s infrastructure significantly reduced downtime exposure and improved service delivery. They said: “It gets it out of my list of problems. It makes it somebody else’s problem. We pay Microsoft to manage it.” They also said the SLAs for Azure far surpassed their company’s internal data‑center uptime performance.

• The VP of compute services at a retail enterprise that migrated more than 5,000 VMs noted that AVS delivered stable operations throughout an unusually large and rapid migration program. They explained that engineering leadership emphasized continuity and proactive prevention of downtime using AVS’s elastic scaling: “[There was] no disruption [and there were] no continuity issues [or] downtime issues both during the migration and post-migration. I would say we have maintained and improved our performance and business continuity.”

Collectively, interviewees attributed improved operational stability to several factors, including:

• Elimination of on-premises bottlenecks (e.g., VPN failures, legacy network paths, and aging hardware).

• Resilience and redundancy in Azure, including regional failover, uptime SLAs, and automated monitoring.

• Ability to add capacity in real time, preventing incidents that would previously have required major on-premises expansion or maintenance windows.

• More predictable and faster issue resolution enabled by unified tooling and centralized support.

• Lower operational burden on internal teams by shifting availability, patching, and platform health responsibilities to Microsoft.

Across industries, interviewees consistently said AVS provides a much more stable operating environment than their organizations’ prior on-premises VMware workloads, both during the migration period and in steady state.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Prior to moving VMware workloads to Azure via AVS, the organization experienced eight significant unplanned downtime events each year.

• Each event lasts 1 hour.

• The composite’s total cost of unplanned downtime is $250,000 per hour.

Risks. The risk that other organizations may experience a different impact from this cost is related to:

• The number and length of unplanned outages per year.

• The total per-hour cost of those outages.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.4 million.

Reduced Infrastructure Costs

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that migrating VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution allowed their organizations to avoid major hardware refresh cycles, eliminate datacenter capital and operating expenditures, reduce licensing and extended security update (ESU) obligations, and enable largescale rightsizing and decommissioning. This led to substantial reductions in infrastructure-related spending.

• Interviewees said their organizations’ on-premises environments were approaching scheduled technology refresh cycles and that updating compute hardware, storage arrays, network appliances, and converged infrastructure stacks would have required multimillion-dollar capital spend and weeks of engineering time. The IT director at a global manufacturing company described how AVS helped their organization avoid upcoming lifecycle costs: “We have a five- to seven-year refresh cycle on servers, and we were looking to avoid the upcoming refresh. So, there’s cost avoidance on the capex side with replacing the nodes that we have in the data center as well as some networking equipment that was coming up for replacement.”

• The VP of compute services at a retail business operating thousands of VMs emphasized that legacy VMware clusters were at end of life and that without AVS, the company would have required equipment purchases and incurred costs related to facilities labor, installation, cabling, and long-term operations.

• Interviewees highlighted significant reductions in software and lifecycle-related costs, especially around ESUs. They noted that workloads running in AVS include ESU coverage at no additional cost, which eliminates a recurring and often unpredictable expense for aging Windows Server or SQL Server instances. The VP of compute services at a retail business noted, “We save on [ESUs] because, in AVS, you don’t need [to pay for] ESUs.”

• AVS migrations also prompted cleanup of long-standing inefficiencies in on-premises VMware workloads. Interviewees said migration waves require validating each VM, which helps their organizations identify redundant, oversized, underutilized, or orphaned workloads. This process created lasting savings by reducing compute, storage, and licensing footprints. The VP of compute services at a retail business said: “It allowed us to do a lot of decommissioning. It also allowed us to do a lot of rightsizing because when we looked at how it was running in VMware, we realized we didn’t need that comparable in AVS. We could chop that compute in half before we moved it.”

• Interviewees across sectors reported that decommissioning and rightsizing efforts eliminated roughly 10% of workloads, cut unnecessary resource allocations, and reduced ongoing cloud consumption once migrated. Many also said their organization consolidated or eliminated colocation costs, network circuits, cooling and power expenses, and support contracts associated with running physical infrastructure.

Interviewees said their organizations saw immediate cost savings and avoided ongoing reductions in operational expenditure with AVS.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The organization closes two data centers as a result of the move to AVS.

• The primary data center had annual operating costs of $500,000.

• The secondary data center had annual operating costs of $250,000.

• The organization faces a hardware refresh in its data centers involving 300 servers which will cost approximately $12,000 per server amortized over a seven-year refresh cycle.

Risks. The risk that other organizations may experience a different impact from this cost is related to:

• The number and size of VMware workloads to be moved to AVS, which will affect the size of the on-premises infrastructure supporting it.

• The cost per server to replace existing infrastructure and the organization’s refresh/amortization schedule, which will affect the annual cost of major capital expenditures.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.6 million.

Redeployed IT Team Members

Evidence and data. Interviewees consistently reported that adopting Azure VMware Solution substantially reduced the amount of labor required to maintain on‑premises VMware environments. Hardware lifecycle tasks, cluster upgrades, re‑IP exercises, and deep‑skill refactoring activities were either eliminated or outsourced, allowing the organizations to redeploy infrastructure engineers to higher‑value initiatives (e.g., modernization, automation, proactive stabilization).

• Interviewees explained that their organizations eliminated these labor and professional services requirements as a result of substantial reductions in day-to-day maintenance tasks. Multiple interviewees highlighted that AVS removed recurring operational burdens (e.g., cluster patching, hardware upgrades, node lifecycle management) and said that automation freed significant staff time. The IT director at a manufacturer mentioned that before using AVS, the organization’s engineers spent a significant amount of time managing and executing upgrades. After migrating, this time was recaptured and reassigned to modernization, automated build pipelines, and cloud governance initiatives.
  The interviewees from healthcare and manufacturing organizations noted that troubleshooting, endpoint support, and multistep provisioning workflows were reduced or eliminated, allowing engineers to focus on architectural improvements and service quality. They explained that because Microsoft handles back-end operations, senior infrastructure staff were no longer interrupted by routine maintenance and could devote time to optimizing capacity, reducing incidents, and accelerating cloud‑first adoption. The VP of IT program management at a healthcare company said: “We wanted to free up some of the people who were constantly devoting time to babysitting the hardware and the data center. Migrating our VMware workloads to the cloud with AVS accomplished that. Those people are now able to concentrate on development and analysis.”

• Interviewees also reported that migration activities naturally aligned with application and VM cleanup. As part of their transitions, infrastructure teams shifted their focus from hardware upkeep to rightsizing, decommissioning, and portfolio rationalization, which reduced future maintenance workloads while improving overall cloud efficiency. The VP of compute services at a retail organization explained: “We did a lot of decommissioning and rightsizing. It let the team focus on improvements instead of keeping the lights on.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite dedicates five IT team members to maintain its two data centers.

• These IT team members are redeployed after the move to AVS.

• The average fully burdened annual salary of an IT team member is $115,000.³

Risks. The risk that other organizations may experience a different impact from this cost is related to:

• The number of IT team members the organization dedicates to data center maintenance.

• The rate of pay for IT team members dedicated to data center maintenance.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.2 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Accelerating the organization’s ability to benefit from future modernization. Interviewees noted that AVS provided their organizations’ IT teams with a low-risk, low-disruption path into a modern cloud environment. They emphasized that this approach let teams experience cloud operations safely and build their familiarity with Azure capabilities and requirements while Microsoft handled cluster lifecycles, uptime, and back-end management. Interviewees said AVS was a useful bridge to cloud operations until their organizations were ready to determine which workloads should be modernized further.
  They also noted that AVS provides an opportunity to accelerate the upskilling process for business teams and IT teams. The VP of compute services at a retail company explained: “It’s a good stepping stone from a business perspective and an IT team perspective to get more used to the fact that you are now cloud-enabled and you’re now running on Azure. It’s a pay-as-you-go model, so that introduces all of the FinOps factors. It also introduces the business teams and IT application teams to a new paradigm for the way they run their applications in the cloud — the automated deployment, techniques, the whole landing zone structure, and the way that works.”

• Fast and cost-effective migration of critical legacy workloads. Several interviewees emphasized that without AVS, their organization would have faced major staffing or consulting costs to execute cloud migrations or modernize aging VMware workloads. The CIO of North America in financial services noted that their organization’s internal team lacked the skills required for a native refactor and would have been forced into a large external services engagement. They said: “We wouldn’t have had the skill set internally to do that. We would have probably engaged [a global systems integrator] to help us do that. It would have cost a half million dollars or more.”
  The IT director at a global manufacturer shared a similar assessment, explaining that without AVS, their organization would have needed to scale its cloud engineering organization significantly, which would require hiring new staff, retraining, and getting consulting support to analyze and redesign workloads for cloud-native platforms: “We would need to expand quite a bit in order to take this on effectively. We would have brought in a partner to start to bring us along and use some consulting to help us do some analysis and understand what refactoring might look like.”
  Across industries, interviewees said AVS enabled their company to preserve its existing VMware skill sets, avoid expensive talent expansion or refactoring projects, and redirect infrastructure teams toward modernization priorities. They explained that this delivered measurable productivity gains, future-proofed their organizations, and created more strategic engineering functions.

• Improved audit readiness and security posture. Interviewees highlighted that AVS materially improved their organization’s audit readiness and security posture by centralizing environments previously inherited through acquisitions or fragmented operations. The VP of IT program management at a healthcare company explained, “We were bringing these acquisitions on that had horrible security postures … and that became just as big a risk for us as it was for them.” They continued, “[With AVS] our SVP of infrastructure sleeps better at night because we can truly monitor these environments and we know what’s going on.” Interviewees also said that shifting workloads into Azure signaled operational maturity and regulatory alignment.

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Azure VMware Solution and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Scaling capacity to meet seasonal or variable demand. Several interviewees emphasized that AVS’s cloud-based VMware infrastructure enabled rapid scaling of compute resources, which is something they said would have required weeks or months with on-premises hardware. The VP of compute services at a retail business noted that AVS allowed teams to add nodes on demand to address sudden spikes in cluster utilization, avoiding potential performance degradation or downtime. Previously, addressing capacity issues required purchasing and racking new hardware, which could take weeks and cost millions.
  A VP of IT program management at a healthcare provider emphasized that AVS is now the foundation of their organization’s managed-services offering and that the company can onboard newly acquired clinics or remote workforces in as little as 90 days with repeatable “wave-based” deployment plans that support rapid, predictable scaling. The director of IT and technology at a manufacturing firm reported that AVS made it possible to immediately provision virtual desktops for contractors — which they said is an operationally unpredictable user group — without buying hardware or overprovisioning endpoints.
  Interviewees explained that having the ability to elastically burst capacity without procurement cycles or data‑center constraints allows their organizations to respond quickly to business needs (e.g., acquisitions, onboarding new revenue‑cycle teams, addressing unplanned workload surges).

• Supporting global expansion without significant IT overhead. Interviewees from organizations that operate across geographically distributed locations said they see AVS as a way to expand their company’s digital footprint without replicating physical infrastructure or staffing. The VP of IT program management at a healthcare organization that’s growing through mergers and acquisitions reported that AVS now underpins the company’s standardized “IT in a box” offering, which enables bringing newly acquired practices onto the unified platform regardless of geography without deploying local data center resources.
  The IT director at a manufacturer with more than 70 global locations said AVS allowed their organization to extend access to centralized ERP and application environments through Citrix and other virtualized workloads, eliminating the need for site-specific hardware refreshes and reducing operational complexity across regions. The CIO for North America at a global financial services firm with highly regulated workloads highlighted that AVS is a compliant, globally available platform that removed the need to maintain specialized in-house skills for legacy VM environments while centralization and simplification across international teams.
  Interviewees said AVS allowed their organizations to grow their operational footprints without growing their data center footprints by supporting new markets, acquired entities, contractors, and remote workforces with minimal incremental IT labor.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).