Migration to Microsoft Cloud

One of the approaches, the description below assumes an organisation is starting from a fully on-premise IT infrastructure and wants to move towards a hybrid or full cloud infrastructure.

Following are the steps required o ensure a smooth transition towards a cloud-first business.

Depending on the starting point, you may already have some of these steps in place or may not have the on-premise applications and workloads listed below.

Following Steps take a business from zero to full cloud in the best way possible.

Step 1 - Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory is always the first step of the process. It is a core requirement for any Office 365, Azure or Dynamics 365 implementation. Azure Active Directory [Azure AD] is Microsoft's enterprise cloud-based identity and access management [IAM] solution.

Azure AD is the backbone of the Office 365 system, and it can sync with on-premise Active Directory and provide authentication to other cloud-based systems via OAuth.

Azure AD incorporates comprehensive identity management capabilities which include multi-factor authentication, device registration, self-service password management, auditing, security monitoring and alerting.

Cost-effective and easy to use, Azure AD helps businesses streamline processing, and improve productivity and security, while single sign-on [SSO] gives employees and business partners access to thousands of cloud applications.

Azure Active Directory provides your organisation with an identity management solution to properly provide access and authentication to the full suite of cloud solutions.

 Step 2 - Exchange online

No matter what your business does, email is a key tool and a quick win for moving to the cloud.

Exchange Online is a hosted messaging solution that delivers the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server as a cloud-based service.

It gives users access to email, calendar, contacts, and tasks from PCs, the web, and mobile devices. It integrates fully with Active Directory, enabling administrators to use group policies, as well as other administration tools, to manage Exchange Online features across their environment.

Migrating to exchange online provides you a number of benefits including:

? Reduced risk of data loss with improved backup and disaster recovery

? Improved control with the exchange online administration centre

? Improved levels of service and email on any device or browser

Step 3 - Cloud documents - OneDrive for Business

Following on from email, moving your employees personal documents to the cloud via OneDrive for Business has a number of benefits.

OneDrive has advanced features for version control, sharing, automatic saving and allows your employees to access and share their personal documents anywhere in the world.

 It provides improved security and control for your documents, replace email attachments in Outlook with OneDrive links, ensuring only permissioned people access your files.

Microsoft provide a migration tool to help move all of your files or once set up users can easily copy all files over to OneDrive for Business.

Step 4 - SharePoint and Teams - Collaboration spaces

After personal documents are migrated the next step is to move shared documents into SharePoint and Teams.

Many organisations are plagued with massive shared drives of folders, no version control, no security or access management and can very easily be accidently deleted.

By moving to share spaces for collaboration it becomes simple and easy to manage shared documents, folders and communication by creating team and project spaces for collaboration and document storage.

Each of these spaces can be access controlled via Azure AD to ensure only the right people within your organisation have access to the information.

The key here is to set up a clear structure and governance model to decide how to set up your SharePoint and Teams environment.

What sites do you set up and who do you allow to create new ones?

Step 5 - Cloud Voice telephony and Teams communication

The last step in the Microsoft 365 stage of your cloud migration is to move away from on-premise desk phones and move to a cloud-based telephony service via Microsoft Teams.

This allows your users to have phone access via a work number on any device anywhere.

 It allows Teams to become the home of communication within your organisation for both internal and external communication

Step 6 - Upgrading your business applications.

 Most businesses use standard COTS business applications to support key processes and departments.

From finance systems, CRM systems, call centre applications, operations and supply chain ERP systems, HR systems and everything in between.

Ensuring that these applications are up to date, secure, accessible and productive is one of the biggest areas of potential ROI for any organisation.

It is often the case that such business applications are out of support, with a limited and shrinking knowledge base from within your organisation.

 If your business applications haven’t changed in 10 years while your business looks very different, then it is crucial that these get upgraded.

When moving your business application to the cloud there are a number of different routes that can be taken.

1. Lift and Shift - Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS]: Move the existing onpremise application and host it in a Virtual Machine in Azure. This is the easiest option that provides the least range of cloud benefits but it will still improve the resilience and accessibility of the application.

 2. Hybrid: When looking to update or add functionality to your existing legacy applications you can use the Power Platform. The Power Platform comes with an on-premise gateway connector that can be used to access your existing application. If the application only requires simple data entry, report running or processes, these inputs and outputs could be recreated as Power Apps, Power Automate workflows and Power BI Dashboards. This provides much of the benefits of a cloud system while still maintaining the on-premise solution. This could also be combined with an Azure Virtual Machine solution for an almost full cloud solution.

3. Upgrade to the vendor's Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] version. By upgrading your existing business applications to the vendor’s SaaS version you ensure you are always on the most recent version and benefit from a much improved range of functionality, automation, reporting and user interface. The move to SaaS also allows you to move to a cost per user model rather than a big upfront capital expenditure approach

Step 7 - Upgrading your custom applications

We have split out COTS business applications from custom applications, as they require a different approach.

With an existing legacy application that was custom made specifically for your organisation, the approach to cloud migration is a bit different.

The approach will be determined by your objectives and business need for the application. One solution that can provide many of the benefits of a cloud migration while maintaining the existing on-premise application is Windows Virtual Desktop [WVD].

WVD is a desktop virtualisation solution from Microsoft Azure. In essence it provides access to on-premise desktops and applications via the internet.

The application will still be hosted on-premise but your employees can access it via Windows Virtual Desktop.

This is not really a cloud migration step but provides many of the benefits via a cloud solution and is a low cost way of getting access to applications via the cloud, without migrating them.

For custom applications moving to the cloud there are three main routes.

1. Lift and Shift - IaaS - Moving the database and server to the cloud but keeping the application the same. Also referred to as ‘lift and shift’, this strategy entails migrating your physical servers and VMs to the cloud just as they are, without any changes to the code. By simply shifting your current server environment straight to IaaS, you reap the benefits of cost savings, security and increased reliability. The advantages of this strategy include: moving quickly with no code changes, the ability to have a cloud provider manage hardware and operating systems and realising lower TCO quickly.

2. Repackage - Also known as refactoring involves using additional cloud provider services to optimise the cost, reliability and performance by refactoring your applications. Your application can take advantage of IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service - PaaS - products such as Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance and containers. The advantages of employing modernised services in this scenario include: lower cost and management, using your current application as-is or with some minor code or configuration changes and connecting to new infrastructure services.

3. Rebuild - The rebuild strategy revises the existing application by aggressively adopting PaaS or even SaaS architecture. The advantages of this strategy include: building new applications using cloud-native technologies, faster development/deployment process, innovation opportunities that take advantage of advancements in technology like AI, blockchain and IoT

Step 8 - Migrate existing infrastructure

Once the above steps have been carried out an analysis of the remaining onpremise infrastructure and servers needs to be conducted to identify the best way of upgrading them.

Looking to move them to Virtual Machines in Azure could be an easy solution to start with.

Windows Server 2008 & 2008 R2 One area to consider is to migrate existing Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 workloads as-is to Azure Virtual Machines [VMs].

This migration to Azure automatically provides an additional three years of extended security updates [ESU].

There's no additional charge for extended security updates on top of Azure VM's cost, and there's no additional configuration required.

Purchase an extended security update subscription for your servers and remain protected until you're ready to upgrade to a newer Windows Server version. These updates are provided for up to three years after the end of support lifecycle date.

Step 9 - Device Management - Microsoft Endpoint management

Microsoft Endpoint Manager helps deliver the modern workplace and modern management to keep your data secure, in the cloud and on-premise.

Endpoint Manager includes the services and tools you use to manage and monitor mobile devices, desktop computers, virtual machines, embedded devices and servers.

Move user device management to Microsoft Endpoint Manager to simplify automated provisioning, configuration management, and software updates for all your endpoints, moving into a new world of remote working. Implementation of Cloud Operations with Azure Server Management Services.

Endpoint Manager combines services you may know and already be using, including Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager, Desktop Analytics, co-management, and Windows Autopilot.

These services are part of the Microsoft 365 stack to help secure access, protect data, and respond plus manage risk.

Step 10 - Leveraging Cloud data

At this stage of the migration all of your applications, infrastructure and servers are all in Azure or available as SaaS services.

This opens up a new opportunity and one of the key areas of benefit from cloud is data.

Now your data is easily accessible in the cloud you unlock three main areas:

1. Business Intelligence - Power BI is the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform. It does have the ability to connect to on-premise data but once you are in the cloud it is very easy to connect to your services. This allows you to create easy, real-time reports and dashboards to better understand your business and make decisions.

               2. A unified data platform - This next step is a key enabler for any cloud-first business where you have all of your IT and data available in the cloud, unifying and tidying it up into one solution to enable easy reporting and analysis. Azure Data Warehouse [now known as Azure Synapse Analytics] is a solution for storing all of your organisations structured data. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless or provisioned resources - at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - With all of your operational data now accessible a next-level step for many organisations is to envision how AI can become more and more a part of your daily operation and the benefits this brings. The good news is that Microsoft Azure, along with the raw processing power required, has a number of services including ML Studio and Auto ML solutions for easy ready-made AI powered analytics to help your business make better decision