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The services from an on-premiseiinfrastructure to the cloud can deliver a number of benefits: Lower maintenance costs, enhanced scalability, and robust disaster recovery, to name a few.IIt’s for this reason that so many organizations are taking steps towards migration.
The ability to shift the burden of upgrades and security off the shoulders of your own organization and onto an esteemed expert’s is an exciting prospect. But it’s also a daunting one, with undeniable risks associated with a poorly planned transition. Without a thorough strategy, it’s easy to see how an organization could wind up in a time-consuming migration gone off the rails, losing billable hours in the process.
Thankfully, Microsoft Azure clients benefit from an extensive list of tools and services specifically engineered to reduce risk and increase the speed and efficiency of cloud migration.
The Microsoft Azure Approach to Migration
To understand the process of migrating to Microsoft Azure, let’s take a look at the three main phases of a migration project:
1) Discovery
In the initial phase, it’s important to identify all the major facets of the project, and to take an inventory of all the relevant resources. Once a thorough understanding of all the resources has been developed, your Microsoft Certified Partner can determine where the migration should begin. Some of the tasks that need to be completed during this first stage include:
- Identifying workloads and applications
- Scoring each workload’s migration readiness
- Mapping current physical hardware to Azure virtual machines
- Forecasting ROI and TOC for migration
The discovery phase helps an organization answer three key questions:
- What does my current environment look like?
- Which applications, workloads, and data will need to be transitioned to Azure?
- How much will the migration cost?
For a complex environment with hundreds or thousands of virtual machines, applications, and data sources, it would be nearly impossible to conduct this discovery phase manually. Thankfully, the tools associated with Azure Migrate use a simplified automated process to deliver accurate forecast results.
2) Migration
Now that a thorough plan has been created based on the specific details of your case, the migration can begin. In this phase, all the virtual machines, applications, and data identified in Phase 1 are replicated on Azure. To reduce downtime, it’s critical that the migration begins by ensuring that all primary systems are safe and will run without issues. Systems must be kept in lock-step with their on-premises counterparts to ensure that your organization can keep conducting business as usual during the migration.
It’s a process that involves a number of steps, including:
- Architecture review
- Capacity and network planning
- Preparation of Azure resources
- Migrating the virtual machines
- Establishing replication sources and targets
- Testing the failover mechanism
- Initiating replication
By no means is this stage easy- it’s complicated and requires the subject matter expertise of a Microsoft Certified Partner to ensure that all data is accounted for in the final Azure configuration. But with proper up-front planning, and the completion of each task one-by-one, the organization can progress to the third phase.
3) Optimize and Modernize
Optimization is not a single step. Rather, it’s a continual process of fine-tuning, constantly seeking to strengthen security, conduct performance tuning, and improve process management. Understanding cloud-specific security risks and adopting the right tools is essential for maintaining a strong security posture after migration. Learn more about ensuring security during migration to your cloud environment.
Microsoft has a number of applications within their portfolio that provide continued visibility into various KPI’s. This ability to monitor on an ongoing basis enables your organization to quickly identify the areas with room for improvement, and to gain insight into the specific actions that will enhance performance.
A Trusted Partner
Migrating to the cloud is a process that requires the assistance of a subject matter expert in order to truly benefit from everything that Microsoft Azure has to offer. That’s why the team at CrucialLogics works so closely with our clients.
We first gain an understanding of each organization’s unique environment, configuration, and goals. Next, we walk our clients through the process step-by-step, providing answers to concerns and managing challenges to ensure a smooth transition. Once complete, we continue our work, training teams to seamlessly navigate the new virtual environment, while continually optimizing the new system. To learn more about how CrucialLogics can empower your team to conduct a smooth migration to Microsoft Azure, reach out to us today!
