As the company grows and scales, a priority has been controlling infrastructure costs while maintaining performance and reliability for its customers.
A focus on scale and efficiency led OneTrust to upgrade from Azure Arm-based architecture to Cobalt 100 VMs as soon as they became available.
The company has seen almost 50% less utilization and immediate savings, as well as improved customer experience.
Every time someone interacts with a cookie consent banner or views a website’s privacy policy, chances are that OneTrust is behind it. In fact, the company powers 400 million consent decisions each day around the world. OneTrust is the AI-ready governance company providing integrated privacy, risk, compliance, and data governance solutions for more than 14,000 global organizations, enabling them to accelerate innovation while ensuring responsible data use.
As the company continues to grow, one objective is controlling infrastructure costs while maintaining performance and reliability for its customers, all while consistently rolling out new features across its platform, including AI capabilities.
OneTrust enables organizations to accelerate the governance lifecycle and automate privacy, third-party risk, security compliance, data governance, and AI governance. As part of its commitment to continue enhancing its platform with AI and automation, the company has unveiled a host of major AI capabilities in the last year. OneTrust’s latest innovations, for example, enable governance teams to drastically reduce the time it takes to complete critical risk assessments–from months to just minutes.
The company’s focus on controlling infrastructure cost–which it measures as a percentage of revenue and tracks weekly–while scaling, initially led OneTrust to adopt Azure Arm-based architecture, says Naresh Bezawada, head of infrastructure cloud engineering for OneTrust. It also prompted the organization to upgrade to Azure Cobalt 100 VMs as soon as they became available.
Cobalt 100 VMs are Azure’s first Arm-based virtual machines that are powered by custom Microsoft processors. They are designed to deliver top price-performance for scale-out, containerized Linux workloads.
“Since rolling it out, we’ve seen almost 50% less utilization and immediate savings. It also helped us with future capacity growth,” Bezawada says.
OneTrust has strategically deployed Azure Cobalt 100 VMs across its infrastructure to support its core business operations. The company’s AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) clusters and node pools utilize Cobalt 100 VMs, with Ubuntu on Azure as the guest OS, in regions where all availability zones support them. Currently, about 25% of OneTrust’s workloads run on Cobalt 100 VMs, with the remainder on Ampere-based VMs and other architectures.
“Anything we do in terms of reducing latency or improving efficiency for our customers, helps drive value and ultimately retention. Reliability has been a key focus in the last three years, and we've been working with Azure very closely to achieve that.”
Naresh Bezawada, Head of Infrastructure Cloud Engineering, OneTrust
As OneTrust customers leverage these new capabilities, Bezawada says the improved performance and reduced latency from Cobalt 100 VMs have directly enhanced the customer experience, leading to greater reliability.
“Anything we do in terms of reducing latency or improving efficiency for our customers, helps drive value and ultimately retention. Reliability has been a key focus in the last three years, and we've been working with Azure very closely to achieve that,” Bezawada says.
OneTrust is collaborating with Microsoft to expand Cobalt 100 VM deployment to additional regions and availability zones. The company aims to adopt Cobalt 100 VMs wherever all three availability zones in a region support them, in line with disaster recovery requirements. Discussions are ongoing with Microsoft to accelerate rollout timelines, and OneTrust plans to increase Cobalt 100 VM usage to as much as 85% as availability grows.
OneTrust relies on a number of additional Azure products to power its platform. In addition to Cobalt 100 VMs and AKS for container orchestration, the company uses Azure SQL Database Server as a Service to maintain a database-per-tenant model, ensuring strict data separation and regulatory compliance for its customers. OneTrust also uses Azure Cosmos DB to support globally distributed, highly responsive workloads, helping ensure that customer data remains available and performant wherever it is needed. Azure Storage and Blob Storage provide scalable, secure data storage, while networking services like Private Link enable secure connectivity. The team also leverages Power BI for analytics and a range of Azure AI services—including OpenAI and AI Foundry—to build and deploy advanced models for governance and customer-facing features.
As OneTrust continues to scale and innovate, Bezawada and his team remain focused on building a resilient, future-ready infrastructure for AI-ready governance that keeps customer trust at the heart of every decision.
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