If you’re considering migrating to the cloud, Microsoft Azure is one of the very best solutions – offering a range of features, services, and benefits. But moving your infrastructure to a virtual, hosted environment can be complex, even for experienced IT professionals.
Fortunately, there’s the option of working alongside cloud migration specialists, who can be on hand to guide you through the migration. However, if you’re interested in learning more about cloud migration strategy, keep on reading – in this article, we’ve explored the steps involved in migrating to Azure, as well as the things to consider post-migration.
An introduction to Microsoft Azure
Azure is a multi-service hosted cloud computing platform, run by tech giant Microsoft. Its offering includes public and hybrid cloud environments, across a range of flexible infrastructures – so you can choose the architectural model that best-suits your business.
For a more thorough overview of the virtual solutions available from Microsoft, delve into the details in our complete guide to Microsoft Azure!
Why migrate to Azure?
If you’re considering migrating to a hosted cloud environment, the chances are Azure has often cropped up as a popular pick – and for good reason! Not only is it a part of the wider Microsoft ecosystem, allowing you to streamline IT processes across the board, but it also offers secure virtual computing, high performance, and dynamic innovation.
Of course, if you’re still undecided on which hosted solution to choose, explore our complete guide to Azure vs AWS, which outlines the advantages of each cloud provider.
Migrating from on-premises to Azure
To successfully execute a smooth and seamless Azure cloud migration, you’ll need to address the following steps:
1. Planning the migration
Before migrating to Azure, it’s important to effectively-plan out the transition, to ensure the process is fully aligned with your business needs. There are typically three planning factors to consider:
- The cloud services you need: Identify the Azure services that will best-contribute to business growth, help you hit your goals, or facilitate simpler management. Note that you don’t need to adopt all managed cloud services.
- Budget and cost-efficiency: During the planning phase, establish how much it’ll cost to migrate to an Azure-hosted virtual environment. Identify opportunities to streamline costs.
- Timelines and contingencies: Create a detailed plan of action, so you have timelines to stick to and accountability to be held against. You should also establish contingency plans, in the event that things don’t go quite as you expect (which, while isn’t necessarily likely, is always a possibility!).
If you’re interested in learning more about this stage, read our guide covering the essential steps involved in planning a successful cloud migration.
2. Preparing your infrastructure
Once you’ve mapped out your migration, it’s time to make sure your current IT infrastructure and environment is in a strong enough condition to move.
It’s typically advised to upgrade hardware and patch software before moving platform, to provide a stronger foundation that’s less likely to experience downtime, drop in performance, or compromised security. Making the fixes beforehand gives the best chance of a successful Azure migration.
3. Migrating to Azure
Once you’ve planned and prepared your infrastructure for the transition, you can actually get underway with migrating to Azure. This will involve transferring both your data and applications.
Migrating your data to Azure
Securely migrate your data to Microsoft Azure, to one of their secure and flexible managed storage solutions – such as Blob or Data Factory. Both of these are capable of storing, processing, and managing huge amounts of data.
Migrating applications to Azure
When it comes to moving applications to Azure, your method of migration will depend on their compatibility. You’ll typically undertake one of the following:
- Rehosting: Rehosting is the most straightforward method of application migration. You’ll not have to make any major changes – the process is effectively a case of moving your apps from one environment to another.
- Refactoring: Refactoring requires a little more involvement than rehosting, as you’ll need to make some minor code modifications to your applications to make them Azure-appropriate.
- Rearchitecting: Rearchitecting involves redesigning your existing applications to maximise the benefits of cloud, including introducing features that facilitate scalability.
- Rebuilding: Rebuilding effectively refers to the need to fully-develop new applications from scratch within the virtual environment. This is the most significant undertaking but may be the most appropriate solution if your current apps aren’t suitable for the cloud.
4. Testing your environment
Once you’ve successfully migrated to Azure, it’s important to test the environment to make sure everything’s moved over as expected and your infrastructure is secure. At this stage, you’ll benchmark performance of your applications, measure threat detection and vulnerability scanning features, and ensure applications are fully-operational.
5. Putting the migration live
Finally, once your migration to Azure is complete and you’re certain the infrastructure is ready, it’s time to put the new environment live.
This will involve making Azure your primary application development and deployment environment, and decommissioning your previous (on-premises or other cloud) infrastructure.
Managing your Azure environment post-migration
Congratulations: you’ve successfully migrated to Azure cloud! It’s a high-performing environment that gives you access to Microsoft’s full range of virtual service and products. However, the work’s not quite finished…
You’ll still need to fine tune and tweak your environment to make sure it’s fully optimised and aligned to your (potentially evolving) business goals. This involves:
- Reviewing service costs and identifying opportunities to reduce spending. This can often be achieved by leveraging Azure’s integrated cost management tools, which will highlight any areas where you’re potentially over-resourcing.
- Review Azure’s additional cloud services. Microsoft is a fully-connected ecosystem of integrated and complementary virtual products, so the chances are you’ll find additional features that further-enhance your cloud capabilities.
The above steps are typically ongoing, which can consume internal IT resource, so you may want to consider adopting fully-managed solutions. Managed cloud services can significantly reduce the strain on your business and allow you to refocus your resources elsewhere.
What are the next steps?
As a Microsoft Partner for virtual services, we’re committed to supporting your business by taking the complexity out of an Azure migration and ensuring your success in the cloud. In short, we can handle the full migration, so you can jump straight into your new environment.
So, whether you’re interested in migrating to a fully-cloud native infrastructure or want to implement hybrid features alongside your on-premises computing, get in touch with our team of consultants who’ll be happy to discuss your bespoke requirements. Alternatively, why not explore even more useful cloud computing insight over on our blog?
