Adaptability isn’t an option. It’s the strategy.
Every day, we engage with organizations navigating growing business complexity across industries, geographies, and regulatory environments. From global manufacturers modernizing plants to financial institutions re-architecting for resilience, we are seeing the same pattern: ambitions are moving faster than traditional architectures can respond to.
Organizations must also contend with geopolitical disruptions, supply chain volatility, and rapid advances in AI that are reshaping how and where companies operate. Competition is intensifying as incumbents and new entrants alike use AI technology to ship faster, scale smarter, and reset benchmarks. Meanwhile, customer expectations continue to rise, with users demanding seamless digital experiences on any device, anywhere, at any time. In this dynamic environment, adaptability is no longer a feature of great architecture, it is the foundation of competitive resilience.
Forrester study: How tech leaders are evolving their infrastructure strategy
To better understand how infrastructure strategies are evolving, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a global study of over 600 cloud and edge decision-makers. What emerged from the data closely matches what we hear in our own customer conversations: leaders are increasingly unifying cloud and edge technologies as a strategic accelerator. The 2025 study, Edge Meets Cloud: A New Era of Scalability and Security, reveals how global IT leaders are no longer treating cloud and edge as separate environments, but rather an integrated approach that enables adaptability for business success.
What tech leaders are prioritizing in 2025
In the study, respondents were surveyed on their top business priorities for the next two years. The results revealed they prioritized enhancing customer experience, increasing operational resilience, and strengthening data privacy. These emerged as interdependent outcomes—requiring companies to invest across both cloud and edge environments, rather than choosing between them.
Respondents also said that, in many cases, operational reality has not caught up with the needs of the business. The top blockers they identified were:
- Siloed IT teams and disconnected platforms.
- Legacy applications that were not built to scale.
- High integration and maintenance costs.
- Security complexity and gaps in real-time insight.
Given these challenges, it’s no surprise that 65% of respondents said their organizations plan to merge their edge and cloud environments in the next 12 months. Why? Because operating in fragments slows everything down from innovation to insight to response time.
The case for cloud and edge integration
When organizations integrate cloud and edge environments, they unlock performance gains across every layer:
- Reduced latency for faster customer-facing experiences.
- Lower costs through smarter, localized processing.
- Better insights from mobile, IoT, and on-premises data.
- More cohesive security and governance.
- Streamlined collaboration across teams and workloads.
In fact, 84% of surveyed leaders say they would value a solution that helps consolidate edge and cloud operations across systems, sites, and teams.
How to get there: Four strategic moves
In the Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft, four key recommendations surfaced providing clear, actionable guidance for business and technology leaders looking to evolve their cloud-to-edge strategies. What stood out to me is how closely these recommendations reflect what we hear from enterprise customers. These aren’t theoretical ideas. They are grounded in what’s working today at scale, across some of the most complex IT environments in the world.
1. Break down silos
Forrester’s first recommendation is to step back and ensure alignment between cloud and edge priorities. This goes beyond technology, it’s about cultural alignment across teams, shared goals across domains, and unified decision-making across cloud and edge environments.
I have seen the impact of this alignment firsthand. Dick’s Sporting Goods, operating more than 850 stores alongside a growing e-commerce footprint, adopted a One Store technology strategy to unify how software is written, deployed, and monitored across all locations through Azure Arc. That cohesion didn’t just improve operational efficiency, it created consistent, high-quality customer experiences across every channel. When edge and cloud teams operate from the same playbook, adaptability becomes the default.
2. Run AI where it works best
Forrester emphasizes the importance of using technologies where they have the greatest impact. Sometimes that means running AI at the edge for real-time responsiveness. Other times, it means leveraging cloud resources for deep analysis and long-term learning. Often, it’s both.
This flexible mindset is one we see increasingly in data-driven industries. LALIGA, which operates over 40 stadiums and serves more than 230 million fans globally, uses Azure Arc to orchestrate infrastructure and AI across environments. They process match-day insights on-site for immediate responsiveness, while simultaneously leveraging the cloud for strategic analysis. By allowing each environment to do what it does best, LALIGA delivers both agility and scale.
3. Design for security and scalability
Security no longer has a static perimeter, instead—it’s an integrated, continuous responsibility across every node, site, and service. Forrester recommends designing security and scalability hand-in-hand, particularly in environments that span hybrid and edge deployments.
AVEVA, a global industrial software leader, faced the challenge of integrating dozens of acquired IT systems—many with their own infrastructure, policies, and compliance needs. Through Azure’s adaptive management and policy tooling, they unified governance across more than 50 distinct Active Directory environments. Now, AVEVA can project its full operational landscape into a single control plane, applying consistent security, observability, and compliance across all regions. It is a powerful example of scaling without losing control.
4. Extend cloud-native to the Edge
As organizations move away from legacy monolith applications, Forrester recommends extending cloud-native development patterns and technologies—like containers, orchestration, and modular architecture—closer to the edge. This accelerates delivery, reduces friction, and supports long-term flexibility.
This is exactly what we’ve seen from Delta Dental, which modernized its core payor system, MetaVance, using containerized services on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Development and test environments live in the cloud, while production workloads run on-prem to meet regulatory requirements. Leveraging AKS, Delta Dental can use one underlying platform to manage all its applications, no matter where they run. The result isn’t just better performance; it’s future optionality. As constraints evolve, the infrastructure is built to adapt.
What’s next for cloud and edge with Azure
To continue this conversation, join us for an in-depth video series featuring Forrester as we unpack the recently commissioned research and strategies shaping the future.
The post Adaptability by design: Unifying cloud and edge infrastructure trends appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.