Azure cloud migration in just four steps – A success guide

When it comes to migrating your datacenter, Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure becomes your most preferred and easy choice for its unmatched business potential. Through Azure cloud infrastructure, customers can yield greater productivity, better agility, reduce costs and become highly scalable. Azure cloud migration requires dedicated focus with expert proficiency to unlock its full power. This blog article articulates the four success steps for Azure cloud migration. Here is a quick guide for companies to refer

Four steps to Azure cloud migration

Microsoft endorses a four-step migration process for migrating to Azure:

• Discover: Index your software and workloads
• Assess: Catalogue applications and workloads
• Target: Classify the destination for each of your workloads
• Migrate: Make the move

So, what does this mean? Let’s take a closer look.

1. Discover :

Discovery encompasses identifying all prevailing workloads and applications in your infrastructure so you can prepare them for migration. It’s an extensive and tedious procedure, but critical to success. Missed applications and workloads can become a pain later on, so you will want to make sure your application inventory is complete and updated. This is where a trusted Microsoft partner such as MSRcosmos helps you sail smoothly by providing managed serviced to orient your workflow from the very beginning.

These are some of the areas that we help you review during the preparation phase:

• Virtual NetworksTo maintain performance excellence, security and stability all the while managing costs, we will analyze your on-premises workloads in your current virtual or physical environment and compare them to corresponding resources in Azure. We will also be addressing networking requirements, how many subnets need to provisioned for, and consider whether you would prefer to provide your own DNS servers via Active Directory.
• Storage SolutionProcuring new storage every time you reach capacity is inconvenient and time-consuming. Azure cloud infrastructure provides various types of Azure storage to consider depending on the nature of the data.Standard vs. Premium – Standard Azure storage has a certain IOPS maximum (volume of data) for each virtual disk. Premium storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines with input/output-intensive workloads.
  Hot vs. Cold – A multi-temperature data management solution will help you conserve costs. How you store your data in Azure depends on how often users need to access it. Hot data requires quick storage, while data that is needed once in a while referred to as cold data is stored on the slowest storage.
• Compute
• The cloud provides you immediate access to computing resources. When planning, one should also look into the option of Azure Autoscale. The autoscaling feature dynamically scales applications to meet varying performance necessities. Azure virtual machines will also give you more access to your computing environment. Azure VMs helps your organisation by providing flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain expensive hardware.

2. Assess:

Once we have a better understanding of how Azure and its array of services fit into your migration strategy, we will help you evaluate your existing infrastructure using the following tools
Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool –

This tool automatically inspects your on-premises environment, and provides you with a tailored checklist and recommendation for moving your workloads to the cloud. After the assessment, the tool creates a report specifying the workload attributes/configuration that are ready to move and what needs further examination before moving. The statement 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, assessment and reporting tool that securely evaluates IT environments for several platform migrations including 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, MAP Toolkit can evaluate environments and deliver readiness information for both physical and virtualized workloads migrating to Azure.

Both these tools can help us carefully appraise all applications, workloads and processes you presently use in terms of –

• Current Infrastructure: Map your virtual and physical system configurations to a comparable Azure instance. Assess specs like CPUs, disk size and storage demand.
• Current Network Architecture and Capacity: Evaluating your network architecture and capacity will help us assess bandwidth to replicate variations made on virtual machines. Using a capacity planning tool or bandwidth assessment tool helps replicating a virtual machine without the risk of data loss.
• Performance Requirements: We will assess what IOPS is required to avoid lags and maintain optimum performance in your new Azure environment.
• High Availability/Resilience Requirements: We need to build a system that will function in the unlikely event of failure. Methodically documenting your disaster recovery processes, resiliency configurations and recovery time objectives helps ensure data can restored easily in your new environment.
• Maintenance Process: Once you move to Azure, certain checks and SOPs help in running your systems effectively. A due maintenance process is essential to keep new cloud environment running smoothly.

3. Target:

Now that you’ve inspected your existing environment, it’s time to map out how to transfer your servers to Azure.

The three likeliest targets for your workloads are:

• Microsoft Azure
• A Cloud OS Network
• Office 365

Productivity and communication-related workloads are migrated to Office 365. This may comprise of moving email to Microsoft Exchange Online, document management to SharePoint Online and moving instant messaging, voice, video and shared application communications to Microsoft Teams.

Aspects like speed, ease of migration, cost and desired functionality will apprise the cloud destination for your workloads. For instance, websites benefit most from the speed of Azure data centres, elasticity of the storage, processing power and memory. These aspects help keep sites responsive even during peak demand.

In the current climate VMs are one of the most important components to consider. VMs are connected remotely and are prone to the erratic nature of Internet latency. Most businesses prefer to migrate non-critical VMs to less expensive cloud resources, however you will want to put VMs in the cloud that won’t be adversely impacted by latency and don’t need frequent network to other resources. The terms for adapting physical server workloads into a VM aren’t always straightforward. Working with a trusted partner can streamline the process to a great extent, leaving you one less thing to worry about.

4. Migrate:

After fulfilling all the pre-requisites, we are ready for the final step, migrating your existing workloads and applications to Azure.

One can spend a substantial amount of time and energy, understanding best practices, studying relevant tools, and preparing; however, it is best not to risk attempting an intricate cloud migration without the right expertise. At MSRcosmos, we have highly differentiated talent and cloud veterans specialising in each step of migration. With more than 130+ migrations under our belt we are your shining beacon towards a successful cloud migration, we can help you successfully migrate to Azure and optimize your new environment with ease, in a matter of weeks. Contact us to learn more.