Microsoft Azure is one of the top choices for organizations seeking to migrate their on-premises digital estate to the cloud. By undertaking on-premises to Azure migration step by step, businesses achieve better performance and break free from the limitations of their existing architectures. So, why exactly should you consider migrating to Azure? What are the essential steps of the migration process? This guide will walk you through several essential migration phases and explore key business outcomes of moving to Azure.
What are the main competitive advantages of Azure?
Azure holds the second position in the market among more than 100 cloud providers, and for a good reason. Businesses migrating to Azure achieve a remarkable 228% return on investment (ROI) in three years, according to a Forrester study. Additionally, Azure helps accelerate application development by 50% and cut development-related infrastructure costs by 40%. Here are several main reasons why Azure presents a compelling opportunity for businesses:
1. Microsoft ecosystem integration and cost-effectiveness
Azure’s pricing models are designed to reduce costs for businesses already using Microsoft products. For instance, features like Azure Hybrid Benefit allow you to reuse existing Windows Server or SQL Server licenses to save on virtual machine costs, potentially lowering expenses by up to 85%. Overall, Azure’s payment plans are quite flexible: you can opt for pay-as-you-go, Reserved Instances, and savings plan models.
2. Extensive global reach and sound compliance
Azure is available in over 60 regions worldwide—more than any other cloud provider. Also, its extensive compliance portfolio, consisting of over 100 offerings, ensures organizations meet even the strictest industry regulations.
3. Strong support for diverse tools and workloads
Azure delivers a wide array of services, from computing and analytics to IoT and databases. Besides integrating with Microsoft tools, it has expanded its support to open-source platforms, Kubernetes, and containers, increasing its flexibility for diverse enterprise needs.
While Azure provides significant benefits when implemented correctly, developing a successful on-premises to Azure cloud migration strategy can be complex. The best course of action for navigating challenges like workload compatibility and cost management is hiring experienced Azure engineers. Their support grants you confidence that all steps in the transition process will be performed professionally, and common pitfalls will be avoided.
Read more: How to overcome the challenges and benefit from on-premises to cloud migration?
On-premises to Azure migration step by step: Key phases and milestones
Here at N-iX, we divide the migration process into five stages to ensure a comprehensive, tailored approach. Let’s review them in detail, along with the main steps our engineers perform when moving our clients’ digital estate to the Azure cloud.
Discovery, evaluation, and readiness assessment
Any project yields better ROI when it’s rooted in specific business objectives. During this initial phase, we discuss your cloud migration and business goals to align the efforts with your strategic priorities and expected outcomes. And if you have yet to form clear objectives, we can conduct a Product Discovery to identify opportunities for optimization. We also perform comprehensive mapping of all on-premises assets and evaluate their readiness for migration. Here are several key steps of this process:
1. Inventorizing assets and dependencies
We start by using tools like Azure Migrate to create a complete inventory of your resources: servers, applications, services, and databases. Then, we map dependencies to understand how these assets interact and prioritize migration from the least to the most critical components.
2. Assessing your current environment
After that, we assess the cloud readiness of your existing workloads. This step helps determine what can be migrated as-is, what needs to be modified, and what should be replaced entirely to function in the new environment. For instance, separating monolithic structures into microservices may sometimes be necessary to fully benefit from Azure’s increased scalability, availability, redundancy, and other cloud-native capabilities.
3. Identifying potential challenges and opportunities
When performing on-premises to Azure migration step by step, evaluating potential migration risks early in the process helps minimize operational disruptions and compatibility issues. During this step, our experts also identify areas where you can make the most of Azure’s cloud-native features.
Additionally, we use this stage to conduct skill readiness assessments among your in-house teams. By evaluating potential skill gaps, we can engage your employees early and deliver sufficient training to help them effectively interact with the cloud infrastructure in the future.
4. Estimating costs and cost savings
Before starting on-premises to Azure migration, it’s essential to estimate the expected infrastructure, licensing, and operational costs of the new cloud environment. Besides using Azure’s pricing calculators, our team can forecast long-term budgeting requirements to ensure they align with your expectations. We also evaluate potential cost savings resulting from reduced hardware maintenance and improved operational efficiency.
5. Choosing a migration strategy
There are five primary cloud migration strategies to prepare your workloads for Azure: rehosting, refactoring, relocating, replatforming, and repurchasing. Also, retiring or retaining may be used when it’s more efficient to terminate a legacy application or keep it on-premises.
After evaluating your assets, we outline a migration plan tailored to your business goals, budget, and resources. For larger infrastructures, this plan may initially focus on defining a general migration methodology. Then, we analyze individual workloads and decide on a specific migration strategy for each of them during subsequent phases.
This approach helps ensure the flexibility needed to address complex architectures while achieving optimal transition timelines and cost-efficiency.
Preparing for migration: Azure architecture and environment design
Before transferring workloads to Azure, we need to lay down the foundation for secure, streamlined migration that maintains business continuity. A well-designed, integrated, and high-performance architecture is precisely that. This phase is when we focus on setting up the target environment, aligning it with your requirements, and preparing on-premises workloads for the transition. The main steps of this process include:
1. Designing the target Azure environment
When starting with Azure, one monumental task is setting up a scalable, resilient environment. During this step, we design an architecture tailored to your performance, compliance, and security goals based on the Microsoft recommended “landing zone” concept. As part of this setup, we may implement governance and compliance policies to ensure your cloud environment remains secure and compliant after the migration process is completed.
2. Structuring Azure resources
The next step is to organize and prepare your Azure environment to host the migrated resources effectively. Mainly, we define and configure the structure of these core Azure components:
- Virtual networks to provide network connectivity with cloud-hosted resources;
- Storage accounts for secure data storage;
- Compute instances that match workloads’ requirements to achieve the best performance;
- Identity management solutions like Azure Active Directory to ensure robust access control;
- Tools to establish connectivity with on-premises infrastructures, enabling secure connection with local users and services.
3. Creating backups
In the context of on-premises to Azure migration step by step, this specific milestone is critical. Although sufficient preparation ensures the transition goes smoothly, there is always a chance of software or hardware malfunctioning. By creating backups of critical resources, we safeguard you against data loss and corruption. We also develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure that if something does go wrong, your system will be restored efficiently and with minimal downtime.
At this point, with the Azure environment configured and workloads prepared, your enterprise is ready to execute the migration confidently.
Pilot program execution and backup testing
Dipping your toe in with a test run helps ensure your strategy is sound before committing to the full-scale migration process. Here are the two main areas we focus on during this phase of migration from on-premises to the Azure cloud:
1. Conducting a pilot migration
We conduct pilot migrations to validate the target Azure setup and chosen migration approaches. Essentially, we start transforming your resources according to the selected cloud migration strategies and transfer a small, manageable subset of workloads. During this process, we monitor their performance, functionality, and user experience to ensure the setup meets your requirements.
Starting small allows us to uncover potential issues or misconfigurations early, reducing risks and preventing unexpected downtime. It also helps confirm compatibility in practice and provides an opportunity to fine-tune performance before scaling up the migration process.
2. Testing recovery plans
In addition to uncovering potential issues, it’s also crucial to test the failover mechanisms we designed and ensure they work as expected. Failover refers to cases when a system experiences a critical error or an unexpected interruption and must automatically switch to a backup. Such scenarios are exactly what we simulate to minimize the risk of service interruption and ensure your systems remain resilient.
Scaling the process and completing the migration
After the pilot migration, the next stage in our on-premises to Azure migration step-by-step plan is transferring workloads according to their priority. Our team works in close collaboration with you throughout this process. By establishing regular communication and feedback sharing, we ensure that the migration approach continues to meet your requirements.
Continuous improvement and optimization
Lastly, we take care of the long-term implications of migration from on-premises to the Azure cloud. During this final stage, we establish processes and implement tools for ongoing monitoring and optimization. Here are several areas we can help you with:
1. Setting up monitoring and management tools
We implement solutions like Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to manage your Azure environment post-migration. These tools help you track resource usage, maintain high availability, and identify performance issues.
2. Implementing security best practices
To keep your Azure environment safe in the long run, we implement strong identity management, access controls, and encryption mechanisms. Additionally, we offer application security testing services and auditing to help you stay compliant with relevant regulations.
3. Developing cost optimization strategies
Azure cost optimization is key to avoiding unpredictable cloud spending and the accumulation of unused resources. After analyzing your resource usage, we recommend adjustments like rightsizing, autoscaling, and implementing savings plans or reserved instances to reduce expenses without sacrificing performance and quality.
4. Defining governance policies
Establishing comprehensive governance policies from the get-go helps maintain control over your Azure environment. We can facilitate this by creating guidelines for spending limits and resource tagging, among other practices, to ensure consistent operations across your teams and projects.
Wrapping up
Migrating from on-premises to Azure grants businesses numerous opportunities to improve scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. By performing on-premises to Azure migration step by step, enterprises can effectively navigate challenges and maximize investment value. Ready to discard the limitations of traditional on-prem infrastructures? Consider partnering with an experienced cloud migration consultant to ensure a seamless transition.
Why should you trust N-iX to handle your on-premises to Azure migration?
- N-iX is a certified Microsoft Solutions Partner with a proven track record of transforming on-prem systems into resilient, optimized Azure solutions.
- As a global tech company with 21 years of experience, we have successfully completed over 200 cloud projects for enterprises in automotive, healthcare, retail, logistics, and other industries.
- We maintain compliance with GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO/IEC 27701:2019 to implement the best security practices for your cloud solutions.
- With a team of 400 cloud experts, we offer diverse expertise in DevOps, modernization, and cost optimization in addition to on-premises-to-cloud migration.
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