Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure for the fourth consecutive year, positioned highest for Ability to Execute.

One Azure platform across environments

  • Azure Arc extends Azure management and governance to resources in datacenters, at the edge, and across multi-cloud environments.
  • Azure Local brings Azure infrastructure and services into customer-controlled locations, so organizations can run cloud services and AI workloads closer to their applications and data.
  • Together, they give organizations a common way to operate across environments without forcing every workload into the same place, while Azure Local keeps expanding from small-form-factor edge deployments to large-scale datacenter setups.
flowchart LR
    A[Public cloud] -->|Azure Arc governance| D[Consistent management, policy, identity]
    B[Datacenter] -->|Azure Local| D
    C[Edge / sovereign location] -->|Azure Local + Foundry Local| D

Choice and control for sovereign workloads

Microsoft Sovereign Cloud is described as a continuum of choices rather than a single deployment model:

  • Many workloads can meet sovereignty needs in the public cloud through data residency, encryption, confidential computing, and policy enforcement.
  • Microsoft Sovereign Private Cloud, built on Azure Local, gives customers greater control over infrastructure, data, operations, and access.
  • For restricted-connectivity environments, disconnected operations on Azure Local bring a local control plane into the customer’s own environment.

Bringing AI closer to data

As AI adoption grows, workload placement matters more: some workloads fit the scale of the public cloud, while others need inference to happen where data is generated for latency, connectivity, governance, or sovereignty reasons. Foundry Local on Azure Local extends AI inference into Azure Local environments, letting organizations run models closer to their applications and data using Kubernetes-native operations.