Introduction

As mentioned in our recent Microsoft Inspire round-up, organisations are now migrating their systems to the cloud at an ever-increasing rate, with cloud migration now simply becoming a must to remain competitive. There are a number of benefits in moving to the cloud (which we have outlined in-depth here) such as spending more time optimising business processes rather than managing IT infrastructure, which also leads to reduced costs. However, many organizations are apprehensive about moving forward without having expert guidance, a set of rich tools and a trusted partner. These fears may be a thing of the past with the introduction of Azure Migrate.

What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is a Microsoft Azure service which helps to migrate workloads from on-premise to the cloud. Bringing all procedures together, it offers proactive advice and tools designed to help transfer customers’ existing applications and systems to Azure with ease.  The process begins with discovering on-premise applications, servers and databases before securing and managing them in the cloud.

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The 4 Step Azure Migration Process


The 4 Phases of the Azure Migration Process

The Azure Migration process goes through multiple phases to make sure all workloads have been discovered and evaluated, and dependencies identified and addressed. Below is an overview of each phase in the Azure Migration process.

Phase 1 – Assessment: This first phase focuses on assessing your existing infrastructure before beginning the migration process. Steps in this phase include:

      • Creating your migration plan.
      • Identifying stakeholders.
      • Calculating TCO (Projection of overall savings)
      • Discovery of apps/servers/databases.
      • Choosing the right tool for the scenario.

Phase 2 – Migrate & Modernise: There are many well-known strategies to migrate to the cloud such as: Rehost, Refactor, Rearchitect, Rebuild.

      • Rehost – For organisations that may not be ready to make changes at the code level of the application, this no-code option lets you migrate your existing applications to Azure quickly. Each application is migrated as-is, which provides the benefits of the cloud without the risks or costs of making code changes.
      • Refactor – This cloud migration strategy involves some change to the application design but no wholesale changes to the application code. Your application can take advantage of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) products, such as Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, and containers.
      • Rearchitect – Modify or extend your application’s codebase to scale and optimise it for the cloud. Modernize your app into a resilient, highly scalable, independently deployable architecture and use Azure to accelerate the process, scale applications with confidence, and manage your apps with ease.
      • Rebuild – Rebuild an application from scratch using cloud-native technologies. Azure platform as a service (PaaS) provides a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, without the expense and complexity of software licenses or the need for underlying application infrastructure. With this cloud migration strategy, you manage the applications and services you develop, and Azure manages everything else.

Phase 3 – Optimisation: The optimisation phase is a continuous process that focuses on monitoring the performance of the migrated workload and ensuring that the assigned resource size is fine. Tools used at this stage include Azure Monitor and Log Analytics. Azure Cost management provides an overview of the cost insights so that savings can be seen for the newly migrated resources.

Phase 4 – Security & Management: The migrated resources will be protected by industry-leading security, giving you full visibility into and control over the security of cloud applications in Azure. Your data will be protected in the cloud, helping you to avoid costly business disruptions, meet compliance goals, and secure your cloud application data against ransomware and human error by backing up your apps in Azure. You can also monitor the health of resources like CPU, Memory, Disk, IOPS etc and their dependency.

Leveraging the power of the Azure Cloud

Primary motivations for moving to the Azure Cloud include an appetite for increased flexibility and innovation. For growing companies looking to stay competitive, cloud migration is now simply a must. As we have mentioned above, previous inhibitors to cloud migration include a lack of expertise and guidance. With the introduction of Azure Migrate, it has never been easier for companies to leverage the power of the cloud.

To learn more about Azure Migrate or to begin your own cloud migration journey, speak to one of the ActionPoint team today.

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