Emirates Global Aluminium adopts hybrid cloud with Azure Arc

The story of Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) takes an interesting turn as the company adopts hybrid cloud with Azure Arc. As the world's largest producer of premium aluminium, EGA knows that its plants cannot stop running, which is why it was looking for a modern and efficient solution. Through the integration of Azure Arc, the company connects its on-premises data centers with the public cloud, optimizing production and making it easier to deploy artificial intelligence and advanced automation.

Alexander Simon, director of digital platforms and infrastructure at EGA, explains that taking advantage of the best of Azure — both in the cloud and in the plants themselves — has been a major change. Since implementing this hybrid approach, EGA has managed to reduce AI operating costs by more than 80% and speed up decision-making response times by up to 13 times.

Now, innovation not only drives internal efficiency, it also opens the door for the technology EGA develops to be replicated internationally, creating new business opportunities. For EGA, aluminium is much more than a metal: it is the foundation for transforming everyday life through technology and the hybrid cloud.

Background and challenges

EGA, a world leader in premium aluminium production, has integrated Industry 4.0 technologies to increase its innovation and competitiveness. Its traditional on-premises systems were proving insufficient in the face of exponential data growth, requiring a more sustainable and scalable infrastructure. This technological transformation makes it possible to process large volumes of information in real time and supports operational continuity across the entire global production chain.

Another critical challenge was regulatory compliance: under data sovereignty laws, EGA had to keep core services and data within the UAE. At the same time, EGA's leadership saw the public cloud as a way to democratize innovation and accelerate AI projects, as long as they could keep sensitive data close to their local operations. In short, they needed to combine the best of both worlds: the elasticity of the public cloud and the control and localization of the private cloud.

Solution: hybrid architecture with Azure Arc

To address these challenges, EGA adopted a hybrid cloud strategy supported by Microsoft technology:

• Connected infrastructure: It deployed Azure Arc to connect its local private cloud (on-premises data centers) with the Azure public cloud, forming a single coherent platform. This was done to optimize latency in the plant, support advanced AI and automation solutions in production, and process massive sensor data streams in real time without losing performance.
• Workload migration: Approximately 1/3 of the servers were migrated to the Azure environment (public cloud) and another 1/3 to Azure Local, the Azure platform for running at the edge. In this way, EGA took advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud while bringing compute closer to the source of the data with Azure Local for cases that require low latency.
• Edge capabilities: Thanks to Azure Local, EGA can run critical AI applications on site. For example, they use AI at the edge to detect equipment failures in the plant in real time (such as faulty component closures) with ultra-low latency. Azure Local not only provides local infrastructure, but also immediate access to advanced Azure services (such as Azure AI and IoT) in the on-premises environment, without having to develop them from scratch.
• Unified management: With Azure Arc, EGA's IT team monitors and manages both Azure and local resources from a single control panel that is centralized. Azure Arc makes it possible to deploy and roll out applications or AI models in any environment in an automated and consistent way, while respecting existing industrial security policies. This seamless integration avoids having to re-engineer solutions when moving them between the public and private cloud, saving time and effort in innovation.

Benefits and results achieved

Thanks to the new hybrid architecture, EGA has recorded substantial improvements in its operations:

1. Accelerated performance: AI applications now respond 10 to 13 times faster than before, while latency has been drastically reduced. This makes it possible to take decisions in the plant almost in real time, raising operational efficiency.
2. Cost efficiency: The company achieved 86% cost savings for certain image and video analysis use cases with AI. The combination of public and local cloud optimized the use of compute resources, eliminating unnecessary spending on traditional infrastructure.
3. Greater development agility: With Azure Arc, EGA's technology teams can deploy new application versions several times a day, compared with the previous pace of roughly once a week. This agility lets them iterate and improve solutions quickly, keeping up with the business and seizing opportunities sooner.
4. Improved production quality: Thanks to industrial AI, EGA now automates key processes, such as the inspection of 100% of carbon anodes through computer vision. This has significantly raised quality control and reduced rejects. Productivity and consistency in processes have also improved substantially.

Sustainability and the future

EGA has made sustainability a pillar of its digital transformation, achieving notable environmental and economic benefits alongside its technological improvement:

• Energy efficiency: By consolidating a third of its servers in Azure, EGA reduced its total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40% and lowered its carbon footprint. 100% of local computing uses renewable energy and the new data centers consume 50% less energy, reinforcing its environmental commitment.
• Continuous innovation: EGA is expanding AI into new areas such as price prediction and autonomous vehicles. It is investing in training its staff on cloud services and data. The digital transformation has an impact on employees, customers and operations.

In short, EGA already "feels and sees the difference" that this transition to the hybrid cloud has brought to its operations. The combination of Azure Public Cloud, Azure Local and Azure Arc has positioned Emirates Global Aluminium at the forefront of efficiency, innovation and sustainability within the aluminium industry, paving the way for its future growth on a solid technological foundation.