Louisiana State Government boosts efficiency, visibility, and security with Azure Arc

A hybrid management solution worth raving about

In Louisiana, tens of thousands of state employees come together to support and serve every citizen, business traveler, and tourist within state lines. The state decided to make the delivery of critical governmental services more accessible and reliable by consolidating its many IT operations “About a decade ago, all the agencies, departments, boards, and commissions within Louisiana had their own in-house IT or local IT vendors,” explains Adrian Erwin, IT Statewide Manager for the SQL team in Data Center Operations at Louisiana’s Office of Technology Services (OTS). Each state entity negotiated its own contracts and costs using differing scales. For example, the state has a large Microsoft SQL Server footprint, and each entity may prefer a different version of SQL Server. Adding to this complexity, constrained budgets often get in the way of teams staying on top of the latest updates. Erwin continues, “Our legislature saw value in bringing all IT services under a single, statewide umbrella. We would save money on enterprise agreements and licensing and benefit from security compliance standards.”

Consolidating the environment helped simplify management but observability remained a challenge. “We had all these servers that we knew were up and running, but we didn’t know what was on them,” says Erwin. The state wanted a solution that could reach across its entire hybrid estate to demystify and better manage its resources.

The Louisiana State Government adopted Azure Arc and Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach to gain full visibility and control while accommodating legacy infrastructure that it couldn’t move to the cloud. With workloads now enabled by Azure Arc, the state can easily manage its SQL Server instances at scale and benefit from cloud-based security enhancements such as automatic patching and consistent governance. “Initially, we couldn’t get anybody to engage in a conversation about the cloud,” says Erwin. “That’s different now that they see what we’re doing with Azure Arc, hear us raving about it, and understand that management will be a lot easier for us and that we can complete requests faster than we could before.”

Saving clicks, time, and risk

The Louisiana State Government OTS currently has two datacenters with 450 SQL Server instances spread between them. Of those, 351 are Azure Arc–enabled, and the rest will soon join them. “Once we’ve upgraded those older versions, Azure Arc will be our management plane for our entire environment,” says Erwin. It used to take a lot of time for IT staff to track down databases and other information throughout the disparate environment. They can now devote that time to developing useful solutions to help make their jobs easier. “Within Azure Arc, we can look at any SQL Server instance and immediately see what version it is, how many databases there are, what their compatibility levels are, and other things that I had to query a server for,” adds Erwin. “All of that is now available in one click.” The additional SQL Arc features are also available at no extra cost through the company’s Microsoft Software Assurance for SQL Server.

The Louisiana State Government OTS achieved another milestone when it strengthened its security posture using the best practices assessment on SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc. “With the best practices assessment, we were able to run servers through a mock audit and get ahead of what we’re going to see when a real audit comes,” says Chris Hale, Information Systems Technical Consultant at Louisiana’s Office of Technology Services. “We’re constantly going through every regulatory framework you can imagine, so the best practice assessment is a game changer for us in terms of bringing everything onto a specific standard.” 

IT staff built Power BI dashboards to better interpret assessment results, visualize key reporting data, and identify and respond quickly to high-priority issues. Because these dashboards collect data automatically from both on-premises and cloud sources, staff now get database and storage costs and other data they need in only 20 seconds, down from an hour and a half.

Building cloud confidence and setting new priorities

When deciding on a management tool, the state considered what other cloud-based solutions it could easily add later. From a load balancer to database service to network security group, state decision-makers preferred the Azure offerings and subscription model. “We saw how different clouds are configured, and we like how everything’s built in with Azure,” says Hale. 

This quick and seamless access to new capabilities has piqued interest in cloud across the state. “Introducing Azure Arc opened up a plethora of options, like the choice to run full SQL Server on-premises at a much lower cost, especially with our Software Assurance agreement,” continues Hale. Other opportunities include running and migrating SQL instances to Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database, a process that will continue to pick up steam throughout 2025 and into 2026. “Our teams have been focused on remaining on-premises for so long, and demonstrating our success with Azure Arc has kicked in a different thought process.”

As IT staff gradually add to the state’s cloud environment, they’ve had no difficulty bringing different components and capabilities together within the adaptive cloud approach. “A lot of perfect Azure solutions fell into our lap at the right time,” notes Erwin. Continuing to build confidence in a mix of on-premises and cloud solutions, the Louisiana State Government is now in the final stages of an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) pilot for containerization and a separate Azure Virtual Desktop pilot for virtualizing Windows desktops and applications in Azure. It also built an internal data gateway and expects to adopt data platform services like Microsoft Fabric. For monitoring, Erwin says, “We have started evaluating database watcher in preview and have been very impressed with what we’ve seen so far. We look forward to it becoming compatible with our Arc-enabled SQL Server later this year to begin larger-scale testing.”

Making things better for everybody

The Louisiana State Government’s SQL team’s initial evaluation predicted that enabling Azure Arc would be, at a minimum, highly cost effective and palatable to infrastructure technicians. And now? “After seeing all we can do with Azure Arc, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database, a lot of us have said, ‘Wow, we really like using this,’ and we’ve shifted to much more of an Azure-first environment,” says Hale. “Running workloads with automatic scaling and lower operational overhead has been a huge benefit, and Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database have been a seamless piece of it.” In recent months, development teams have been drawn to projects using Azure App Service, which gives those teams an on-ramp to start using more modernized platforms until AKS starts to take hold.

Hale continues, “It’s going to take a little while as we make decisions about what gets migrated, what falls off naturally, and what’s a good fit, but I’m much more at ease presenting to our information security group. I can take them on a tour in the Azure portal and say, ‘This is how we’re passing this traffic to you now.’ It’s one thing for someone just to go in there and start doing cloud stuff, but you really want the experts involved. So, the easier it is to bring our different teams in, the better this will be for everybody.”

Louisiana locals can also rest assured that their government is using their tax dollars more efficiently and getting maximum value from operational investments. “Once we have new dashboards ready to go for all the state agencies, there’s no doubt it will bring tremendous value and even more ease of use,” says Erwin. “It’s also going to buy us a lot of goodwill with our customer agencies, and I think everybody would agree transparency in government is a good thing.”

Discover more about Louisiana State Government on LinkedIn.