It goes without saying but making the move to the Cloud can provide a whole host of different benefits, however the road getting there can prove tricky. You will find that in the long-term using Azure will help to take your business to the next level by reducing the costs associated with keeping costly IT infrastructure as well as freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks across your business.
As well as the cost savings, you will also improve the data security in your business through Azure by using the multi-layered security features available in the Cloud. As well as saving your business valuable time, you will also conserve resources, improve security as well as reducing costs. With this in mind, it seems that moving your business to the Cloud should be a no brainer. Your business will be able to take advantage of these services to both create, allocate and manage applications at scale.
To make sure that your business makes a smooth transition to Azure, you should follow Microsoft’s strategy for cloud migration. Even though, your specific migration approach will be tailored for your business, you should follow the steps below in some form or another in this order:
- Discover and Assess
- Migrate
- Optimise
- Monitor
Let’s look at these in more detail in this article.
1) Discover and Assess
Before you even start your migration journey, you will need to put together an inventory of every single on-premises server and existing workloads in your environment. Granted, this can be an extremely labour intensive process, however, it will help to determine how successful your migration will be. In order to avoid headaches further down the line, you will need to complete this to a high standard.
There are a number of cloud adoption strategies available such as rehosting, refactoring, rearchitecting, rebuilding and replacing. You will find that these migration options will help you to assess each application that you wish to migrate to find out which one is the best on a case-by-case basis.
Rehost
This strategy is relatively simple to implement as it simply means lift and shift which doesn’t require much input or changes at all. In the vast majority of cases this means moving a Virtual Machine data centre to a VM in Azure. This strategy enables you to straight away take advantage of the benefits of moving to the Cloud by moving apps as they are without any problems or changes.
Refactor
When it comes to refactoring, this simply means migrating services that are on VMs over to a PaaS environment. Through the use of this approach, you can easily reduce overheads, increase release agility and minimalize costs. As well as this, making slight changes will help to guarantee that all things run smoothly in the Cloud which can help to improve performance.
Re-architect
In some cases, you will find that some systems need to be restructured to allow them to be migrated.
Rebuild
If you learn that rearchitecting your software is much more costly than starting from scratch, you could consider rebuilding it instead.
Replace
For certain businesses, replacing existing customised applications with third-party solutions could provide some real long-term value.
2) Migrate
Given that you have now conducted a comprehensive audit and got your applications and workloads ready for the Cloud, you are now ready to take the next step towards doing so.
Please note: Start the process with smaller migrations at the beginning rather than with larger critical workloads. This will help to minimise any risks at the start and prevent any mistakes being made when later moving to larger workloads.
3) Optimise
When you have successfully moved your services to Microsoft Azure, you will need to conduct a review of your implementation to check that it is working as it should be. This is where you are on the hunt for any areas which need to be optimised further. Two such options to review are: right-sizing resources and cost management.
Right-sizing
To make sure that the service is right for your business, you need to check the usage metrics. From this service, you will be able to configure metrics collected for each analysed service. After which, the service then collects useful data from workload patterns across a set period of time.
Cost-Management
Conducting regular cost analysis and reviews can help you to obtain an optimum balance between workload demands and costs. Better still, Microsoft Azure can provide a number of different tools that can help you to monitor costs such as Azure Budgets and many more.
4) Monitor
After you have successfully migrated to Azure and fully optimised your system, you will need to keep an eye on both performance and health. This can be achieved through the use of Azure Monitor.
Azure Monitor is a log data platform that collects activity logs and resource logs along with other monitoring data to provide deep analysis across your entire set of resources.
Next Steps?
Following on the blog above, you should now have a clear understanding of the processes involved in making the migration to Azure. Even though each cloud migration project is unique to their businesses, the steps above can give you an idea of what needs to be completed to achieve success.
Despite the fact that you can complete an Azure migration without an expert for a relatively low cost in the short term, if you mess it up, it can be expensive to fix. Here at Advantage, we are equipped with a team of Azure experts who can help you migrate to Azure quickly and confidently, if you are looking to kickstart this migration with us then simply give our team a call today to discuss your specific requirements.
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