After years of working on projects that were built directly in the cloud, or where it was possible to completely replace on-prem infrastructure with cloud services, we encountered a project at a manufacturing company that presented an entirely different type of challenge.

Even during the initial analysis it was clear that a pure-cloud path would not be feasible in this environment. Some on-prem solutions were simply irreplaceable for running production operations. At the same time, the environment needed to be standardised, modernised, and brought under better control.

What Azure Arc Is and Who It Makes Sense For

Azure Arc is relevant when you have part of your infrastructure outside Azure but still want to take advantage of unified management, governance, monitoring, and automation.

Azure Arc can be particularly interesting for organisations that:

  • Run servers outside Azure — in on-prem environments or on other cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud). This covers both Windows Server and Linux, virtual and physical machines.
  • Already use the Microsoft ecosystem — Active Directory, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Azure. Azure Arc makes it possible to connect the cloud and on-prem worlds into a single logical whole.

What Azure Arc Can Bring You

The main value of Azure Arc is not in one "killer feature" but in connecting multiple areas of infrastructure management:

  • unified governance for both cloud and on-prem
  • centralised monitoring and alerting
  • collection of logs, metrics, and inventory including advanced analytics
  • unified update management for both Windows Server and Linux
  • more flexible licensing for Defender, SQL Server, or Windows Server
  • process automation across on-prem and cloud
  • more efficient use of existing licences (Software Assurance, Microsoft 365, Entra ID)

Practical Example: SQL Audit in Hours Instead of Weeks

One of the most recent practical use cases was a Microsoft SQL audit across the entire environment. The reason was straightforward: a real overview was needed for licensing and planned consolidation purposes.

This is precisely where the power of having Arc deployed as part of everyday operations became apparent. There was no need to prepare anything additional or deploy special tools. The auditor immediately gained an overview of:

  • the number of servers with Microsoft SQL deployed in any version,
  • the number of SQL instances, their version, edition, and technical details,
  • the number of databases, their state and configuration,
  • workload and basic performance parameters,
  • actual connections to individual databases.

The result was built on real data, not historical records or estimates. No manual data gathering, no chasing down teams.

Why Azure Arc Is Worth Keeping an Eye On

Azure Arc is not just "another Azure service". For many organisations it can represent a very pragmatic way to modernise infrastructure that, for various reasons, cannot or does not want to be one hundred percent cloud-based.

If you are managing an environment where cloud and on-prem coexist, and you want to introduce unified management, strengthen governance, improve monitoring, and automate operations — then Azure Arc is definitely a service worth including on the short list.