Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by shifting their application development and deployment to Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The purpose of this study is to give readers a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact, or ROI, of leveraging Azure PaaS for their organizations. This ROI represents benefits gained by customers that moved from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to platform-as-a-service (PaaS). For customers migrating from on-premises environments to PaaS, the return on investment can be even greater. PaaS allows customers to focus on application innovation without the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure and removes the need to perform many IT tasks like patching, networking, and server management.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an Azure PaaS implementation, Forrester interviewed eight customers that had several years of experience with Azure IaaS and had more recently adopted Azure PaaS. They leverage specific service offerings such as App Service, SQL Database, and Azure Active Directory.
With Azure PaaS, customers were able to streamline and automate processes across key functions and lines of business, enabling them to meet their objectives, keep costs in check, and increase revenue. They also said that the ease of development and management meant more applications were created and updated, providing greater value to the organizations and their customers. The strategist and founder of a US IT services firm said: “Developing our app without PaaS? Well, we wouldn’t have done it. Frankly, the extra time and resources required would have wiped out any profit that we have generated.”
