Azure Migration Strategy

Migrating your datacenter to an IaaS platform like Azure is a big step for small businesses. There are many benefits to moving to the cloud — like increased productivity, better agility and decreased costs- but getting there is a real challenge.

Microsoft Azure provides a range of cloud services, including those for computing, analytics, storage and networking. We can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications, in the public cloud. It is best for hosting collaboration systems, running big data applications, and migrating on-premise infrastructure.

Azure Migration Phases

Microsoft has distributed them into four phases:

• Discover: Catalog your software and workloads

• Assess: Categorize applications and workloads

• Target: Identify the destinations for each of your workloads

• Migrate: Make an actual move

Discover

Discovery involves identification of all your existing workloads and applications in your infrastructure so you can make them ready for migration. Though the process would be a bit boring but critical to success. Make sure that you are not going to miss any of your application or workload because if you did miss the later part is going to be a mess, so just be sure about it.

During the preparation, phase makes sure about these areas Virtual network, Compute, and storage solutions.

Assess

Once you get a proper understanding of Azure products and how they’ll fit into your migration strategy, these tools would help,

Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool

Whether physical or virtualized this tool would automatically inspect your on-premises environment and will also provide a checklist to move your workloads on the cloud. Once the assessment is done the tool generates a detailed report telling about they are ready to move further with proper investigation. It also provides additional resources to resolve issues and prepare the workload for a move to Azure.

Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit

The MAP Toolkit is an agentless inventory, reporting tool and assessment that securely assesses IT environments for various platform migrations as Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 365, Windows Server 2012 and Windows 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014, Hyper-V, Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track and Azure. Since version 8.0, Assess of environments and readiness information that is provided for both physical and virtualized workloads migrating to Azure with the help of MAP Toolkit

Both tools can help you with reviewing the applications, workloads and processes that you use currently.

Target

As now when you have checked your existing environment so now is the time to get your servers in Azure.

Targets for your Workload are,

1) MS Azure

2) Office 365

3) A Cloud OS Network

These factors like speed, cost, desired functionality, and easy migration will inform cloud destination for your workload. The points which can also be considered are Virtual machine and Operating systems.

Migrate

Now that you’ve checked and prepared your existing workloads and applications, you’re ready to migrate to Azure.

You can always read the best practices, study available tools and get prepared for the trial-and-error inherent in any new pursuit. But the potential savings are not worth the risk involved in attempting a complex cloud migration without the right expertise.

Are you looking for any help in Azure Migration? Or still, have questions about mapping your existing workloads in Azure? Our cloud experts are ready to help with their extensive experience.