Get Started with Microsoft Azure – Cloud Migration Opportunity and Adoption Journey

Seize the Cloud Migration Opportunity.

Now that you are familiar and up to date with the basic knowledge of Cloud Computing and the services provided by each cloud's deployment model. It is time to introduce you to Cloud Migration. Cloud Migration is referred to the process when a company moves its data center capabilities or business elements into the cloud, usually to operate on the cloud-based infrastructure provided by a cloud service provider such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. In a layman’s term, this process can be viewed as the physical migration of things; for example, from a small office to a larger one, the primary differences being cost reduction and greater flexibility.

Who should migrate to the cloud, and how?

Migration to the cloud is an important opportunity. Businesses, regardless of their asset size or scale should not miss. While many organizations are already embracing cloud technology and are moving away from the legacy infrastructures, cloud migrations are now taking place within the cloud, i.e., migration between different cloud service providers. This process is also known as cloud-to-cloud migration. Those foraying into the world of clouds should:

Analyze their business objectives: how cloud technology fits into their business type.

Prepare their company for the cloud: what will help streamline their company's processes and improve their business outcomes.

Optimize digital assets on the cloud: what to do after migrating to the cloud to achieve excellence with innovative cloud-based technologies.

Why migrate to the cloud?

There are many reasons and advantages to moving to the clouds.

Let us look at a few of them:

Cost: Cloud Migration reduces operating infrastructure costs—hardware, software, staff, the server room, and climate control costs. Those expenses can be redirected, to invest in modern technology and improve existing products.

Scalability: Cloud computing reduces the load from on-premises infrastructure, pushing the data and applications on the cloud.

Performance: The performance is directly improved by migrating to the cloud as the applications hosted in the cloud can quickly scale to serve more users and run-in geographical locations near end-users.

Digital experience: Cloud computing redefines the digital experience by making the data accessible on the cloud services. The modern and flexible tools provided to employees lead to enhanced experiences for the end-user.

The Cloud adoption journey.

While each business caters to a different audience and has diverse needs, they customize according to their size and type. Various cloud service providers can assist companies set up their migration process; however, most of them will include the following steps:

Establish Goals: The organization should set desired outcomes to check whether their desired outcome aligns with their expectations to map the cloud migration success.

Create an Azure migration strategy: An organization must evaluate its assets and workload before using the Azure data migration services. Post which, they should create their adoption plan using Gartner's 5R's (rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild, and replace).

Ready your organization: Prepare the cloud environment by constructing Azure landing zones that enable migration, modernization, and innovation at an enterprise scale in Azure.

Adopt the Cloud: Move and innovate using the Azure native tools such as Azure Migrate, Azure Advisor, Azure Cost Management + Billing, etc.

Govern digital estate: Evaluate your organization's history and resolve the gaps across critical domains, as defined in the Governance methodology of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework - organizational readiness, resource consistency, cost management, deployment acceleration, security baseline, and identity baseline.

Manage digital estate: The organization gets ownership to manage enterprise Azure workloads and optimize for cost, security, data integrity, etc.

The Cloud Adoption Framework powered by Azure provides organizations a reliable methodology to create and implement the strategies required to succeed in the cloud. The above points are small windows that investigate the world of operating Microsoft Azure Cloud services.

In our next blog, we will delve into why Azure is the right choice for your business, regardless of its size. We will examine the benefits of Azure in detail. Let Extentia be your knowledge partner in exploring and adopting Microsoft Azure Cloud. Extentia will help provide solutions to your business problems and help you ease into the world of Microsoft Azure Cloud.

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