{"id":39457,"date":"2026-05-15T00:39:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:39:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/39457\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T00:39:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:39:28","slug":"modernizing-it-infrastructure-at-microsoft-a-cloud-native-journey-with-azure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/39457\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernizing IT infrastructure at Microsoft: A cloud-native journey with Azure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Engage with our experts!<\/p>\n

Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request a virtual engagement<\/a> on this topic with experts from our Microsoft Digital team.<\/p>\n

At Microsoft, we are proudly a cloud-first organization: Today, 98% of our IT infrastructure\u2014which serves more than 200,000 employees and incorporates over 750,000 managed devices\u2014runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s massive transition from traditional datacenters to a cloud-native infrastructure on Azure has fundamentally reshaped our IT operations. By adopting a cloud-first, DevOps-driven model, we\u2019ve realized significant gains in agility, scalability, reliability, operational efficiency, and cost savings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve created a customer-focused, self-serve management environment centered around Azure DevOps and modern engineering principles,\u201d says Pete Apple, a technical program manager and cloud architect in Microsoft Digital, the company\u2019s IT organization. \u201cIt has really transformed how we do IT at Microsoft.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur service teams don\u2019t have to worry about the operating system. They just go to a website, fill in their info, add their data, and away they go. That\u2019s a big advantage in terms of flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Apple<\/p>\n

Pete Apple, technical program manager and cloud architect, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n

What it means to move from the datacenter to the cloud<\/p>\n

Historically, our IT environment was anchored in centralized, on-premises datacenters. The initial phase of our cloud transition involved a lift-and-shift approach, migrating workloads to Azure\u2019s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. Over time, the company evolved toward more of a decentralized, platform as a service (PaaS) DevOps model.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last six or seven years we\u2019ve seen a lot more focus on PaaS and serverless offerings,\u201d says Faisal Nasir, a principal architect in Microsoft Digital. \u201cThe evolution is also marked by extensibility\u2014the ability to create enterprise-grade applications in the cloud\u2014and how we can design well-architected end-to-end services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because we\u2019ve moved nearly all our systems to the cloud, we have a very high level of visibility into our network operations, according to Nasir. We can now leverage Azure\u2019s native observability platforms, extending them to enable end-to-end monitoring, debugging, and data collection on service usage and performance. This capability supports high-quality operations and continuous improvement of cloud services.<\/p>\n

\u201cObservability means having complete oversight in terms of monitoring, assessments, compliance, and actionability,\u201d Nasir says. \u201cIt\u2019s about being able to see across all aspects of our systems and our environments, and even from a customer lens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decentralizing our IT services with Azure<\/p>\n

As Microsoft was becoming a cloud-first organization, the nature of the cloud and how we use it changed. As Microsoft Azure matured and more of our infrastructure and services moved to the cloud, we began to move away from IT-owned applications and services.<\/p>\n

The strengths of the Azure self-service and management features means that individual business groups can handle many of the duties that Microsoft Digital formerly offered as an IT service provider\u2014which enables each group to build agile solutions to match their specific needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal with our modern cloud infrastructure continues to be a solution that transforms IT tasks into self-service, native cloud solutions for monitoring, management, backup, and security across our entire environment,\u201d Apple says. \u201cThis way, our business groups and service lines have reliable, standardized management tools, and we can still maintain control over and visibility into security and compliance for our entire organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The benefits to our businesses of this decentralized model of IT services include:<\/p>\n

Empowered, flexible DevOps teams<\/p>\n

A native cloud experience: subscription owners can use features as soon as they\u2019re available<\/p>\n

Freedom to choose from marketplace solutions<\/p>\n

Minimal subscription limit issues<\/p>\n

Greater control over groups and permissions<\/p>\n

Better insights into Microsoft Azure provisioning and subscriptions<\/p>\n

Business group ownership of billing and capacity management<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the PaaS model, and SaaS (software as a service), it\u2019s more DIY,\u201d Apple says. \u201cOur service teams don\u2019t have to worry about the operating system. They just go to a website, fill in their info, add their data, and away they go. That\u2019s a big advantage in terms of flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of centralized monitoring is gone. The new approach is that service teams monitor their own applications, and they know best how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Delamarter<\/p>\n

Cory Delamarter, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n

Leveraging the power of Azure Monitor<\/p>\n

Microsoft Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution for collecting, analyzing, and responding to monitoring data from cloud and on-premises environments. Across Microsoft, we use Azure Monitor to ensure the highest level of reliability for our services and applications.<\/p>\n

Specifically, we rely on Azure Monitor to:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Create visibility. There\u2019s instant access to fundamental metrics, alerts, and notifications across core Azure services for all business units. Azure Monitor also covers production and non-production environments as well as native monitoring support across Microsoft Azure DevOps.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Provide insight.\u00a0Business groups and service lines can view rich analytics and diagnostics across applications and their compute, storage, and network resources, including anomaly detection and proactive alerting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Enable optimization.\u00a0Monitoring results help our business groups and service lines understand how users are engaging with their applications, identify sticking points, develop cohorts, and optimize the business impact of their solutions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Deliver extensibility.\u00a0Azure Monitor is designed for extensibility to enable support for custom event ingestion and broader analytics scenarios.<\/p>\n

Because we\u2019ve moved to a decentralized IT model, much of the monitoring work has moved to the service team level as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of centralized monitoring is gone,\u201d says Cory Delamarter, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. \u201cThe new approach is that service teams monitor their own applications, and they know best how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patching and updating, simplified<\/p>\n

Moving our operations to the cloud also means a simpler and more automated approach to patching and updating. The shift to PaaS and serverless networking has allowed us to manage infrastructure patching centrally, which is much more scalable and efficient. The extensibility of our cloud platforms reduces integration complexity and accelerates deployment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt depends on the model you\u2019re using,\u201d Nasir says. \u201cWith the PaaS and serverless networks, the service teams don\u2019t need to worry about patching. With hybrid infrastructure systems, being in the cloud helps with automation of patching and updating. There\u2019s a lot of reusable automation layers that help us build end-to-end patching processes in a faster and more reliable manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apple stresses the flexibility that this offers across a large organization when it comes to allowing teams to choose how they do their patching and updating.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the datacenter days, we ran our own centralized patching service, and we picked the patching windows for the entire company,\u201d Apple says. \u201cBy moving to more automated self-service, we provide the tools and the teams can pick their own patching windows. That also allowed us to have better conversations, asking the teams if they want to keep doing the patching or if they want to move up the stack and hand it off to us. So, we continue to empower the service teams to do more and give them that flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Securing our infrastructure in a cloud-first environment<\/p>\n

As security has become an absolute priority for Microsoft, it\u2019s also been a foundational element of our cloud strategy.<\/p>\n

Being a cloud-first company has made it easier to be a security-first organization as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cloud enables us to embed security by design into everything we build,\u201d Nasir says. \u201cAt enterprise scale, adopting Zero Trust and strong governance becomes seamless, with controls engineered in from the start, not retrofitted later. That same foundation also prepares us for an AI-first future, where resilience, compliance, and automation are built into every system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cloud-native security features combined with integrated observability allow for better compliance and risk management. Delamarter agrees that the cloud has had huge benefits when it comes to enhancing network security.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur code lives in repositories now, and so there\u2019s a tremendous amount of security governance that we\u2019ve shifted upstream, which is huge,\u201d Delamarter says. \u201cThere are studies that show that the earlier you can find defects and address them, the less expensive they are to deal with. We\u2019re able to catch security issues much earlier than before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are less and less manual actions required, and we\u2019re automating a lot of business processes. It basically gives us a huge scale of automation on top of the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nasir<\/p>\n

Faisal Nasir, principal architect, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n

We use Azure Policy, which helps enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale using dashboards and other monitoring tools.<\/p>\n

\u201cAzure Policy was a key part of our security approach, because it essentially offers guardrails\u2014a set of rules that says, \u2018Here\u2019s the defaults you must use,\u2019\u201d Apple says. \u201cYou have to use a strong password, for example, and it has to be tied to an Azure Active Directory ID. We can dictate really strong standards for everything and mandate that all our service teams follow these rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI-driven operations in the cloud<\/p>\n

Just like its impact on the rest of the technology world, AI is in the process of transforming infrastructure management at Microsoft. Tasks that used to be manual and laborious are being automated in many areas of the company, including network operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is creating a new interface of agents that allow users to interact with large ecosystems of applications, and there\u2019s much easier and more scalable integration,\u201d says Nasir. \u201cThere are less and less manual actions required, and we\u2019re automating a lot of business processes. Microsoft 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, and other AI tools are giving us shared compute and extensibility to produce different agents. It basically gives us a huge scale of automation on top of the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apple notes that powerful AI tools can be combined with the incredible amount of data that the Microsoft IT infrastructure generates to gain insights that simply weren\u2019t possible before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can integrate AI with our infrastructure data lakes and use tools like Network Copilot to query the data using natural language,\u201d Apple says. \u201cI can ask questions like, \u2018How many of our virtual machines need to be patched?\u2019 and get an answer. It\u2019s early, and we\u2019re still experimenting, but the potential to interact with this data in a more automated fashion is exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Microsoft has become a cloud-first company, and that has allowed us to work toward an AI-first mentality in everything we do.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a complete observability strategy across our infrastructure modernization helps us to make sure that whatever changes we\u2019re making, we have a design-first approach and a cloud-first mindset,\u201d Nasir says. \u201cAnd now that focus is shifting towards an AI-first mindset as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Key takeaways<\/p>\n

Here are some of the benefits we\u2019ve accrued by becoming a cloud-first IT organization at Microsoft:<\/p>\n

Transformed operations: By moving from our legacy on-premises datacenters, through Azure\u2019s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, and eventually to a platform as a service (PaaS) DevOps model, we\u2019ve reaped great gains in reliability, efficiency, scalability, and cost savings.<\/p>\n

A clear view: With 98% of our organization\u2019s IT infrastructure running in the Azure cloud, we have a huge level of observability into our systems\u2014complete oversight into network assessment, monitoring, compliance, patching\/updating, and many other aspects of operations.<\/p>\n

Empowered teams: Operating a cloud-first environment allows us to have a more decentralized approach to IT infrastructure. This means we can offer our business groups and service lines more self-service, cloud-native solutions for monitoring, management, patching, and backup while still maintaining control over and visibility into security and compliance for our entire organization.<\/p>\n

Seamless updates: The shift to PaaS and serverless networking has enabled a more planned and automated approach to patching and updating our infrastructure, which produces greater efficiency, integration, and speed of deployment.<\/p>\n

Dependable security: Our cloud environment has allowed us to implement security by design, including tighter control over code repositories and the use of standard security policies across the organization with Azure Policy.<\/p>\n

Future-proof infrastructure: As we shift to an AI-first mindset across Microsoft, we\u2019re using AI-driven tools to enhance and maintain our native cloud infrastructure and adopt new workflows that will continue to reap dividends for our employees and our organization. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Try it out<\/p>\n

Get started on your own cloud journey with the Cloud Adoption Framework for Microsoft Azure.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Related links<\/p>\n

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We\u2019d like to hear from you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Engage with our experts! Customers or Microsoft account team representatives from Fortune 500 companies are welcome to request…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[420,24222,7853,10371,416,8171,320,4528,7852,10373,1777],"class_list":{"0":"post-39457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-microsoft","8":"tag-azure","9":"tag-azure-and-cloud-infrastructure","10":"tag-azure-copilot","11":"tag-azure-networking","12":"tag-copilot","13":"tag-it-and-business-operations","14":"tag-microsoft","15":"tag-microsoft-azure","16":"tag-microsoft-copilot","17":"tag-network-and-infrastructure","18":"tag-network-security"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}