Forrester study finds 228 percent ROI when modernizing applications on Azure PaaS

Using modern apps in the cloud to do more with less

There’s no denying the pivotal role developers play in today’s organizations. Whether you’re a high-tech company, a non-profit organization, or a fast-food restaurant, robust digital and online services are key to your customer success. Take the example of one of our customers, Jotun, a multinational chemical supplier—their customer-facing and sales applications are mission critical to their business. But with a small development team managing global applications on premises, the time and effort they spent on routine management and administration was extensive.

The company decided to embrace application modernization—ending investments in on-premises structures—and migrate their apps to Microsoft Azure with Azure App Service. In addition to eliminating routine maintenance tasks and increasing uptime, the new approach enabled them to scale developer expertise, deliver high application performance from anywhere in the world, and begin the transition to a modern development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) approach—all while lowering costs and accelerating time to market.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) represents one of the most cost-effective ways to strategically shift resources to application innovation, rather than spending time managing application infrastructure. Azure PaaS services like Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, and Azure Integration Services provide developers and IT professionals with a fully managed application platform for building, deploying, and managing applications of all kinds—from the simplest website to the most complex business solution. Developers focus on innovation, and the cloud platform takes care of everything else. A new, commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, The Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) of Azure PaaS, details the significant business impact of this approach.

Through a series of customer interviews, Forrester finds that a composite organization—an anonymized aggregate profile of these customers—using Azure PaaS can realize:

◉ A three year 228 percent return on investment (ROI), with a payback period of 15 months.

◉ A 50 percent increase in the speed of application development.

◉ A 40 percent reduction in app-dev related infrastructure costs.

Speaking with Azure customers, Forrester observed several common factors that drove their organizations’ decision to adopt Azure PaaS for modernizing applications. These include being part of a broader strategic initiative, the potential for cost savings, limitations with existing architectures, wanting to take advantage of cloud capabilities, the tight market for tech talent, and prior experience with Azure.

Simply put, this set of fully managed services offers a powerful tool for enterprises to equip their developers in the rapidly changing application landscape.

Retire legacy infrastructure, reduce server costs, and deliver value faster with Azure

Whether your goal is to modernize applications in the cloud, integrate with modern databases and AI, rapidly build apps with low-code platforms, or future-proof existing applications, Azure helps you to provide your developers with the right tools for the right job.

Let me tell you about several ways Azure's fully managed services can transform your organization’s application development process:*

Tackle application development infrastructure costs

Whether you’re operating in an on-premises or hybrid environment, Azure PaaS supports your migration needs efficiently, enabling you to retire legacy infrastructure after applications are fully migrated.

Forrester estimates total application development-related infrastructure cost savings for the composite organization at USD19.1 million over three years during this process.

Rely on trusted cloud infrastructure and security management

While migrating to virtual machines is sometimes the simplest and fastest path for many organizations, application modernization provides the full benefits of the public cloud. PaaS makes this easier because now companies benefit from the cloud provider managing the underlying infrastructure and software of the platform. The cost savings for the composite organization begin almost immediately, with Forrester research showing estimated savings of USD10.3 million on related administrative costs over three years.

Free developers to focus on innovation

Developers are at their best when they’re given time to focus on innovating and developing new applications. Modernizing with PaaS helps increase productivity using dev/test and staging environments, provides the ability to run on the latest versions of the OS, languages, and framework, and enables the use of modern DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery. The potential for savings for the composite organization is up to USD7.2 million over three years.

Prioritize application uptime

Offloading management of infrastructure not only reduces the immediate spending, but also ensures that the service provider is responsible for maintaining a 99.95 percent SLA uptime. The resiliency inherent in the fully managed service approach provides peace of mind to the developers in the composite organization and an estimated USD3.8 million in avoided revenue losses over three years.

Reap immediate benefits for your business

With an efficient and reliable platform that works out of the box, developers increase the speed of application development by up to 50 percent. The improved time to market saves the composite organization USD2.8 million over three years and enhances the organization’s ability to serve customer needs better.

*Disclaimer: In this study, Forrester provides the detailed assumptions and methodology used to arrive at these estimates. We encourage readers to use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Azure PaaS.

Source: microsoft.com