The number of enterprises using Microsoft Azure is growing at an tremendous rate and Microsoft’s revenue from the Azure platform grew by around 60% per quarter this year. If you are one of the businesses enterprise planning migrating your apps, users, and workloads to the cloud, the next step is to develop a migration strategy.
If you have only migrated between on-premises systems in the past, then moving to the cloud will be a somewhat different experience. The good news is that with a little preparation, migrating to Azure is not overly complex.
At Roxait, we are helping many enterprises to migrate from on-premises systems to Azure. While every business is unique, there are certain general principles that you can follow to develop an effective Azure migration strategy.
9 step Azure migration strategy
If you are planning to migrate to Azure, the following steps will help you develop a migration strategy that suits your business:
1. Assess your existing infrastructure
The first step in migrating to the cloud is to examine your company’s existing digital solution's. Take the time to examine the applications you use, where your data is stored, your current security mechanisms, user groups, and identities, and then put together a comprehensive picture of how you utilize digital technology.
You can assess which technologies can be migrated directly to the cloud, which will need to be updated, and which will need to be replaced by analyzing your current digital footprint.
2. Choose the type of migration you want to make.
There is no single path to ‘perform’ an Azure migration; the technique you select will be determined by your technical expertise, cloud ambitions, and organizational complexity. There are four sorts of Azure migrations in general:
- Lift and shift: You just move all of your data and applications from your on-premises servers to the cloud using this method.
- Rearchitect: This method involves completely overhauling your underlying software as well as your information architecture to make it more cloud-friendly.
- Re-packaging: You may have to make changes to the underlying code in some applications to make them cloud-ready without making any major architectural changes. Eg, if a .NET Application, your configurations should be updated to handle Azure Service Bus or Azure SQL Server Connections.
- Rebuild: Most radical way is to entirely delete many of your existing applications and replace them with fresh new Azure tools and architecture.
3. Prioritize you applications and workloads
Regardless of your migration plan, you’ll want to prioritize workloads and data so that you may start transferring particular types of material based on your requirements. The migration of low-value data to the cloud is typically prioritized by businesses. If there are any problems, they are unlikely to cause any inconvenience. At the same time, it helps you to earn Azure migration experience. Following that, you may want to prioritize specific out-of-the-box programs, user groups, and lastly your most mission-critical applications and tools.
4. Begin small and work your way up.
When you migrate to the cloud, it’s best to start small and work your way up rather than trying to complete the entire process in one weekend. Begin by moving a small number of files or programs to ensure you have the necessary bandwidth and capacity. After that, as your experience grows, you can progressively increase the amount of apps, tools, users, and databases you move to the cloud.
5. People should be trained and change management should be implemented.
Training employees and assisting them in adapting to the shift in their working environment are essential components of any effective cloud migration strategy. This must be considered from the start of any migration, and it is critical to bring people on board and assist them in making full use of the cloud.
6. Think about security and compliance.
It’s critical to think about compliance and security while preparing your Azure migration strategy. In general, Azure provides high-quality data protection and security, but you’ll still need to think about things like data loss prevention, cloud data backup, geography (especially if you’re processing European citizens’ data), and permissions to make sure that your existing security and compliance measures are replicated in the cloud.
7. Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the process of managing and provisioning infrastructure using code rather than manual processes.
Configuration files containing your infrastructure specifications are created with IaC, making it easier to change and distribute configurations. It also assures that you provision the same environment every time. IaC supports configuration management and helps you prevent undocumented, ad-hoc configuration modifications by codifying and documenting your configuration standards. There are a ton lot of features, you can always commit your code, keeping versions, rollback etc. etc..
8. DevOps
DevOps was actually formed by combining “development” and “operations,” and a definition at Gartner says
“DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”
7. Analyze the infrastructure after migration
The final stage of any successful Azure migration is to monitor your new environment, identify any issues and ensure that it is being adopted by end users.
Creating a migration strategy for Azure
Because every company is distinct, the particular steps of your Azure migration strategy will be as well. At Roxait, we’ve assisted a wide range of enterprises — from small start-ups to huge multinationals — in migrating on-premises systems to the cloud utilizing dependable and repeatable migration methodologies.
Contact us today to schedule a cloud workshop to learn more about how we can assist you in planning your Azure migration.
