Microsoft Azure Migration Guide - Key Planning and Decision Points Before Migrating to Azure

With such an increased interest in Cloud computing, and with companies like Microsoft expanding their datacenters to Canada, now’s a great time for organizations who are looking at a datacenter refresh to consider migrating to Azure. Migrating a datacenter to Azure is a cost-effective alternative for many organizations.

By migrating to Azure, you can reduce your capital and operational expenditures and improve your organization’s elasticity, scalability, and overall security.

But where do you begin on your Azure migration journey? And what do you need to do before you can migrate your datacentre to Azure? Here are some key planning and decision points.

Azure Migration Guide 1: Understand Your Business Case

When determining if a move to Azure is the right one for your organization, it is important to start off by examining your business case for doing so. What are the drivers for this move? For example, are you looking to decrease operational expenditures? Reduce your capital expenditures? Make an improvement in your overall security and compliance? These are important things to know before you commit to migrating to Azure. Here are three steps to follow and some key aspects to consider:

Step 1: Understand your current business environment and economics

Consider the following: What are your strategic objectives? What’s driving you to migrate to Azure? Have you determined a budgeting cycle? Who owns your company’s current infrastructure and maintenance? Do you have a long-term vision to be fully Azure-hosted?

Step 2: Understand your as-is architecture & constraints

Before beginning a migration to Azure, it’s important to know about the business outcomes from your current on-premise solution. Can you explain the design decisions you took when you put the on-premise solution in? Have you explored your technical constraints?

Step 3: Gather detailed as-is usage data

Before migrating to Azure, it’s important to map your on-premise data center usage. You need to know how much actual usage your current environment is getting, and what is the level of demand your current system has, so you’ll be able to determine the size of Azure virtual machine you’ll need.

Azure Migration Guide 2: Develop a Detailed Financial Model for Various Options

Once you’ve completed the three steps listed above, you need to turn your attention to developing a financial model for your Azure migration. But, when you’re considering this, it’s recommended that you don’t just consider one single option to replace your current environment exactly, but consider a minimum of at least two options, with a “stay as-is” option as one of them. Considering multiple Azure target options means you can determine which of your options has the best financial business case over time.

When mapping out these financial models, consider the type of infrastructure you want to include, the licensing you’ll need for that, whether or not you require your environment to be scalable, and what current contracts you may have in place.

Azure Migration Guide 3: Plan for Migration

After you’ve determined which of the models you want to go with, it’s time to plan for your migration to Azure. Depending on the size of your environment, your migration project could take some time, so it’s important to plan for a period of coexistence – where some of your services will be running in your new Azure environment, and others will reside in your on-premises environment. Keep in mind your on-premises bandwidth requirements, the deployment sequence you’re going to use, and how you’re going to switch everything over.

For more information about Original Article - click Here