Build strategic Azure cloud migration plan with Azure Migrate

Building a strategic Azure cloud migration plan for smoother transition on cloud

Organizations have been increasingly choosing to migrate on cloud due to the many business benefits they achieved which they targeted before migrating on cloud. Understanding the need to move on cloud is one the main reasons why success come fast to organizations that had planned their cloud migration strategically. And so, before starting to think about Azure migration plan, it is important to understand the motivation behind it and how it is going to contribute to business success. Reviewing what the business requires in terms of technical requirements can help IT heads take important decisions to develop a cloud migration plan. Service providers that offer Azure consulting services can guide organizations to realize the benefits of migration of Azure cloud.

The first question which comes into any CTO’s head is how to create Azure migration strategies, and it is a very valid question considering the existing IT landscape and how it can be migrated and modernized on cloud. So, the first step that needs to be taken for Azure cloud migration is identifying what needs to be migrated and creating a plan with a service provider that offers Azure migration services.

One of the best cloud migration tools available in the market is Azure Migrate which can be used by organizations to discover and assess their on-premises workloads for Azure migration. Microsoft’s Azure Migrate is a great tool to calculate the performance of current on-premises workloads and the cost of moving them on Azure. It is also used to transfer servers, web applications, databases, virtual machines (VMs), and data from on-premises to Azure.

IT heads need to create an Azure Migrate Project in Azure Portal to use the Azure Migrate service. In Azure Migrate, a lightweight Azure migrate appliance performs agentless discovery of on-premises workloads that consists of VMs, virtualized servers, and physical servers. This is done by Collector Appliance that collects metadata of all on-premises VMs and sends the information to Azure Migrate. It is also possible for IT heads to enable dependency mapping to determine which VM on Azure will provide the best performance to handle the on-premises workload.

Once the data is collected, user can export the application inventory list to SQL server instances running on servers. With Azure Migrate’s database assessment tool, IT heads can understand the SQL server readiness for Azure migration. To assess the readiness of SQL Server migration to Azure SQL database or Azure SQL Managed Instances, migration readiness status percentage helps gain insights into server instances. For each server, there is a recommended target in Azure to easily migrate the database in an Azure environment.

Migrating workloads to Azure and migration to Azure cloud can be complex sometimes but Azure Migrate helps in reducing resources, maintenance, and real0estate cost, and optimize the workloads. Planning Azure migration in the right way helps organizations drive greater success and gain flexibility & scalability. On Azure, meeting demand spikes is easy because an enterprise can instantly tap into on-demand resources. When planning migration on Azure, organizations can depend on Azure migrate to seamless migrate their on-premises workloads on Azure.