Arxus achieves simplicity in hybrid and multi-cloud environments with Azure Arc

The leadership at cloud solutions provider Arxus has always believed in moving fast. Since its founding over 15 years ago, the Belgian company has adapted constantly to changing customer needs as it helps businesses with their digital transformations.

The choice to adopt a public-cloud-first strategy was a natural consequence of this agile culture. “It was an early adopter move on our end,” says Jochen Van Gasse, the company’s Head of Microsoft Business and Innovation.

“We took a long, hard look in the mirror and asked ourselves: What is the market going to look like in the next three to five years?” he adds. “It was pretty obvious for us that we didn't have the economies of scale to keep on par with the hyperscalers.”

Today, around 60% of their 800 customers are on the public cloud. More importantly, the company can manage entire hybrid or multi-cloud environments from a central location, both for itself and its customers, all thanks to Azure Arc.

Arxus—whose customers operate in widely different fields, ranging from the maritime sector and logistics to public institutions—already had a strong “one plus one equals three” relationship with Microsoft. This included co-selling arrangements.

“It was pretty much a no-brainer for us to choose Microsoft as the hyperscaler to get that growth,” says Van Gasse. The transition to Azure Arc means Arxus can now target new customers and strengthen its offering to existing ones.

“About a year ago, we only did server management for customers on our own private clouds or in Azure,” says Thijs Hereygers, Product Owner for the Azure Cloud Management Platform at Arxus. “Now, we can provide that same management on their on-premises environments as well. That's a big addition to our portfolio.”

A single view of complex environments

Azure Arc enables users to see all of the servers in their environment through a “single pane of glass” on the Azure portal, Hereygers says. “It makes everything so much easier when you can view all those servers in one place, instead of using different tools for different locations. I believe for customers or IT managers, that's one of the main benefits of using it.”

Another benefit is that “all the other Microsoft services are at your fingertips, like Microsoft Defender, Azure Monitor, Azure Update Manager, and so on. So it’s definitely an enabler if you look at the broad picture of how an environment is managed,” he adds.

Because Azure Arc is installed on their organization’s entire footprint, IT managers can see exactly where they need to enable Defender and where they don’t. Achieving this holistic view of Arxus’ security posture required much more work before.

“In the past we collected inventory data in our configuration management database using complex scripts. Now with Azure Arc all that information is at hand, and we are breaking down data silos,” Hereygers says.

Being able to manage environments more easily and combine disparate tools reduces operational overheads, he adds.

The increased flexibility offered by Azure Arc extends to pricing as well. Wouter Delvaux, who is in charge of SQL management at Arxus, says the pay-as-you-go options for SQL pricing are an attractive offering for Arxus’ customers.

“It’s a great pricing model because it's scalable,” he says. “For example, when the customer needs extra hours for some workloads, the license model scales as well because it uses hourly billing instead of monthly.” 

“When a machine is powered off, it automatically disables the license for the customer. We’ve converted almost every license in our own data center to this model,” he adds.

Hereygers says, meanwhile, that running patch management for customers at scale has never been easier. “We have a customer portal where they can see all their virtual machines on Azure or on-premises, and you can activate patching on all of them.”

“We assign a tag towards a specific server and, based on the value of that tag, it gets patched within a specific schedule,” he adds. “You can apply that tag towards one server, or hundreds of thousands.”

Fast and easy adoption

Implementation of the solution went smoothly, Hereygers says. “It's not complex—no more complex than how you manage any Azure environment. You can treat Arc resources as if they are native Azure resources, using the same experiences and tools."

“It's not about having major infrastructure changes,” adds York Van den Heuvel, Tribe Lead Cloud Custodian at Arxus. “You don’t have to invest in new servers or connected machine agents or whatever. It’s almost with the flip of a switch, and you're enabled.”

The transition did, however, involve a mindset shift for Arxus’ engineers to get used to doing things in a new way. Because Arxus’ employees are fascinated by new technologies, this was not difficult to achieve.

“Our people are techies; they are fond of trying out new stuff,” Van den Heuvel says. "So even though it felt a bit cumbersome at the beginning because they had to learn new tooling and stuff like that, it actually got adopted quite easily and quite fast.”

Hereygers adds, “If you are a customer that uses Azure already, you don't need a lot of time to implement Azure Arc because it’s quite simple, it's quite transparent, and it could save you in costs for your on-premises resources.”

At the same time, he says, “if you want to replace some current technologies or tools that you use in-house because they are maybe outdated, maybe end of life, or not supported by the vendor anymore, Azure Arc is a great alternative for that.”

For Arxus, the real ‘aha’ moment came just after the team helped a pilot customer implement automatic patching using Azure Arc, he says. “The concept was proven, and we could continue with other customers.”

More ‘fantastic’ features incoming

Arxus is now one of the leading companies in Belgium for adopting cloud tech for on-prem infrastructure. This ability to move first was partly enabled by the fact Arxus is so closely connected to the Microsoft product teams, and partly because the company was well-positioned for it, Hereygers says.

“Because we have this close relationship with Microsoft, we're always directly engaged with the new ​stuff coming out from their side, and because we come from a data center background, we could immediately see the possibilities with Azure Arc,” he says.

That background also meant the team was able to test the ins and outs of the solution while maintaining close contact with Microsoft about any issues and requesting changes. 

Hereygers and the rest of the team continue to be early adopters. One feature they are trying out in Public Preview is Run Command, which allows them to remotely run a script inside servers, which is helpful for troubleshooting, recovery, diagnostics, maintenance, and more.

“We can automate actions running towards virtual machines no matter where they exist,” he says. “We’re involved with the Microsoft team and giving them our feedback so we can use it in production.” 

He and the team are excited for Run Command to be finalized. “It has fantastic capabilities,” he says. “I think it could be one of the greatest features of Azure Arc.”