Things to consider when your business migrates to Microsoft Azure cloud

I believe there are major benefits that a public cloud offering such as Microsoft Azure can provide for business. In my mind cloud isn’t just something you turn on and immediately move to. It’s a process of assessment, migration and then the ongoing optimisation of your cloud environment. 

Over the years I have provided roadmaps for plenty of customers through the migration and transformation process.  

Here’s my top tips on things to consider in migrating to Microsoft Azure.  

Cloud brings plenty of benefits. The four key ones we see resonating with IT and business decision makers are: 

• Cost savings - Nearly everyone is looking to save money, and cloud can provide significant savings, not just through the licensing, but in the reduction of on-premises equipment and paying only for what you consume. 
• Scalability and agility - Cloud enables you to scale up and down quickly based on business needs, without having to factor in the cost, or time required, to purchase hardware or resources. 
• Security and maintenance - Microsoft has invested heavily in security for its Azure data centers, so you don’t have to. Your virtual machines, databases or apps are protected by the highest level of security, removing the need for many of the routine security tasks required of on-premise equipment, enabling you to focus on higher value tasks. 
• New innovations - The cloud offers plenty of cloud-native capabilities, such as innovations around speech, vision and voice, which can open new doors for Australian businesses, particularly those serving consumers (think easy-to-deploy chatbots, for example). 

The Five R’s  

• Rehost (‘lift and shift’) - where you redeploy your systems to the cloud as is. This enables you to reduce Capex, and get a quick cloud ROI. As an example, you might have a website being accessed by customers in the United States or Europe. Rehosting the site in a Microsoft Azure data center in the US or Europe ensures less latency for customers in those regions. Rehosting is a good starting point for businesses in the move to cloud, and most Australian small businesses can gain some great benefits and quick return on investment from rehosting. 
• Refactor - where apps are altered minimally to enable you to connect to cloud services, enabling you to gain greater cloud efficiency such as resources, speed or costs. 
• Rearchitect - where apps are modified and extended in order to optimise them further for cloud. This can include breaking down a large application into a group of cloud microservices. Rearchitecting can help provide greater scale and agility and easier adoption of new cloud capabilities. 
• Rebuild - where completely new applications are built specifically for the cloud, using cloud-native technologies, enabling you to take advantage of enhancements in artificial intelligence, internet of things or blockchain, for example. This can help accelerate innovation, while enabling you to build apps faster and reduce operational costs. 
• Right-sizing - under utilised VMs, including deallocating VMs in off hours and deleting unused VMs. 

Working with capable partners like Insight adds great value to your cloud journey. We can bring the cloud skills, project management and migration team required to ensure your migration goals are met. 

We can continue to add value through managing, supporting and servicing the migrated applications to ensure you’re optimising the cloud value. Over time, we can leverage data generated from the apps to deliver insight to help you innovate further – becoming a true trusted advisor in the process. 

The three phases of Azure migration 

1. Assess: Using a mixture of software tools and consultancy best practices, use provide guidance and best practices into what applications can be migrated, their current configurations, the people impacted by migration and the dependencies of the application. That assessment can be used to put together a comprehensive plan for what to do with your unique application environment. 
2. Migrate: This is the heavy lifting stage, where recommendations in your assessment plan are put in place. Azure subscriptions are set up using best practices for security, connectivity, policies and general governance. Applications are rehosted, refactored, rearchitected or replaced, depending on your business’ needs, and then evaluated and tested to ensure they are working to the criteria outlined in your assessment. 
3. Optimise: A critical third step is the ongoing reviewing of your Azure cost to track spending and identify areas for cost savings. This is a chance to right-size any over-provisioned, under-utilised VMs and to identify apps that could get greater cost savings using platform-as-a-service (PaaS). 

There are plenty of options for predicting your cost savings in moving to Microsoft Azure, including the Azure Total Cost of Ownership calculator. It’s a critical first step in assessing cost savings. 

There are other ways to help you save on infrastructure costs, including:

• Using Azure Credit for Visual Studio subscribers 
• Using Reserved Instances for static and predictable virtual machine workloads and paying upfront for one or three years 
• Hybrid Benefits, which enables you to avoid repurchasing your SQL or Windows licenses