With the new advancement in the technologies of future generations and to cope with the increasing demands, it is quite necessary to scale up or down with the requirements of the product. You are required to start your migration process by analyzing and planning your migration with proper insights.
Azure provides us with a simple migration process with properly optimized resources or services used in Azure. With the proper assessment of ongoing applications, we can migrate to Azure in a healthy way and also modernize our applications in the migration process.
7 Tips To Remember While Migrating to Microsoft Azure
Objective Planning
You need to have a clear objective before migrating to the cloud, you need to discuss the major points with the key teams as well as the stack holders involved in the migration strategy. Instead of shifting the whole infrastructure at once, you must try for migrating a small part of the infrastructure to the cloud.
When migrating to the cloud you also need to care about the dependencies of the project, check upon the appropriate configuration, and then migrate to possible options.
Cost and Savings
When migrating to the cloud, it is important to check out the costs associated with the services azure provides. In Azure, you are provided with Azure TCO. It works in the form of below stages:
- Current assessments
- Confirming assumptions
- Reviewing TCO calculations
With the help of TCO, you can estimate the costs that will be incurred while migrating to Azure and calculate the current costs of the services to be used after migration.
App assessment
You need to discover, assess and migrate on-premises virtual machines to Azure. You can use Azure migrate to migrate all your apps at once. It would help if you created an inventory of the apps that need to be migrated to the Azure cloud when we set a cloud strategy, it is a must to go through the risk assessment such as:
- Agility Risk
- Availability Risk
- Security Risk
- Supplier Risk
- Compliance Risk
Key points to consider
1.Networking
You need to check for the virtual network created in Azure and look at the performance and reliability allowed while working on-premises. Also, you need to relate how you will distribute data within the subnet or maintain connectivity from the external environment.
2.Storage
You can review the Storage services Azure provides and decide upon the retrieval time your application can afford or the number of operations performed per second. You can plan accordingly which data to reside into the Azure offerings such as:
- Hot Tier: This tier is optimized for storing the data accessed or modified frequently. The storage cost is highest due to the high availability, and the cost for the hot tier retrieval is the lowest. You can choose the hot tier for your application if you want your data to be highly available and faster access rate.
- Cold Tier: This tier is most suitable for data not being accessed frequently by applications, and the data inserted is expected to be stored for at least 30 days. The cool access tier costs less than the hot tier. The Cold tier applies a per-GB charge for accessing the data. You want to access these types of files once in a while and pay slightly less for storing but more for accessing the data.
- Archive Tier: This tier stores rarely accessed data, and the storage rate is the cheapest. You are expected to store for a minimum of 180 days and can expect a significant retrieval rate. The Archive tier is helpful storage for large amounts of inactive data, such as data that is required for compliance purposes and long-term backup.
3.Scalability
Scaling your application is the most necessary point for the application.
Support Team
While going for migration from on-premises to cloud, you need to be aware of the possible aspects as well outcomes that will be needed for smooth lift and shift, to make it happen in a swift way, you can take the help of support partners available for your help and also available for further assistance required to maintain the cost savings and dependencies.
You can get personal assistance from certified engineers with years of experience and modernization experts and get help for Azure quickly and confidently. You can check out Azure partners that can help you out in solving your issues properly and guide you through a proper plan in a swift manner.
Some popular questions face before migration are:
- Can Azure Migrate help with modernization?
- While migrating, will Azure be able to maintain my legacy apps?
- Can Azure Migrate Assessment be applied on physical servers?
- How to start with Azure Migration services?
….and many such questions.
The support teams are quite experienced to handle queries and maintain the flow of migration go hand in hand.
Skilled Team
When migrating to the Azure cloud, it is essential to have a skilled team so that every associate in the organization knows the benefits of cloud services. The unit can be encouraged for either fundamental training or specialized certification in particular topics such as security, architecture, etc.
Your team needs to be specific in handling the loads to the migration server. It should be a pre-planned strategy within the team to look for the modules that can be completed in your workload migration. Since your business requirements may vary within projects, always take a close look at the decision of the stakeholders involved and follow the strategy.
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Needs to migrate to the cloud
- Maintaining and managing the infrastructure required to run the business is done by the customer themselves. Accordingly, the costs associated with the infrastructure fluctuate with the increasing demands as well as the workforce required to manage them.
- Product improvement is being compromised on the reasons of maintaining the on-premises infrastructure. Associates cannot focus on new features or innovations and have to dedicate much time to handling the infrastructure.
- Due to lack of right IT infrastructure, many organizations suffer huge losses during peak hours.
Cloud Migration Strategy
Several strategies can be used while migrating to the Azure cloud. You can choose suitably the one that fits your requirement.
For example, in the lift and shift migration, in this particular approach, you can directly shift your apps to the cloud services instantly and receive all the cloud benefits that too in less time and expense without many changes in the code.
- Rehosting: In this type of strategy in which you can move an application to the cloud with minimal effort. You need to move your application to Azure as they are without any of the code changes in it. The only thing to remember is to make sure you are not required to make any additional code while migrating to the Azure cloud.
- Refactor: It takes advantage of cloud-managed services such as databases, storage, networking, and computation rather than migrating existing ones to the cloud and continues to manage them according to the requirements.
You make the changes in the application design but not in the code. Furthermore, the application will use the IaaS or PaaS benefits for further innovations. - Rearchitect: This step or strategy to migrate to the cloud allows you to create a highly scalable, easily deployable application. To implement it, you must make changes to adapt it to the cloud architecture.
- Rebuild: In this strategy, you put the existing application aside and build the same application again from scratch using the Azure platform. Also, when building the application on Azure, you take the help of leading Azure resources such as Azure Functions and Logic apps to build the application tier. You need to plan out which parts of the application can be rebuilt in the Azure platform to get the same functionality.
Secure and Optimize
After successfully migrating to the Azure cloud, you can check further for cloud savings and optimize the services per the demand. Azure provides many optimization and cost management tools to check usage and cost savings, such as Azure application insights, Azure cost management, pricing calculator, and SLA.
Azure security center can be used to review the safety of the application and monitor the security of your environment. It improves the organization’s overall compliance with the help of ongoing assessments, actionable insights, and reports through which you can regulate compliance. In newer updates, Azure has included a Security benchmark integration with Secure Score, which can help download audit certification reports and integrate of shared responsibility model.
Secure Score is built on the Azure security benchmark and provides a key performance measurement against Azure security Benchmark controls. Secure score provides recommendations that can help quickly identify the highest risk factors in the Azure environment.
Conclusion
Migration can be a complex process if not worked properly in the planning; you need to take care of every dependency associated with the environment and help from the experts to work on the pros and cons while migrating to any cloud platform. Prepare the assessment for your organization and move further on the proper cloud adoption process to make it a swift process.
Azure is the best platform to migrate with a highly available cloud infrastructure with lots of advantages as a variety of databases, blob tiers to manage your data, and inbuilt monitoring services to check up on issues are well perfect to migrate on Azure with cost-efficiency.
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