Critical Considerations for Azure Migration

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Using an on-premise infrastructure can sometimes present challenges and constraints, such as the need to invest in redundant infrastructure for scaling out. The adoption of cloud solutions is becoming the new normal, with most companies having part or all their workload on the cloud. One of the leading cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

However, migrating to the cloud is a comprehensive organizational change that involves stakeholders and processes across the organization. Thus, it is critical to develop a clear and detailed Azure cloud migration strategy.

You should start by deciding beforehand relevant questions such as what is the reason for moving to the cloud, what assets or infrastructure are going to move, what apps cannot be migrated, and the cost and benefits.

While migrating to Azure presents an array of benefits, among them compatibility with Microsoft products and the availability of advanced computing services, there are a number of considerations to take into account before migrating your workload. Read on to learn more about the critical aspects you need to consider when migrating to Azure.

Why Migrate to Azure?

Azure is an advanced cloud computing service offered by Microsoft. It is geared for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services, using data centers managed by Microsoft. The platform emphasizes hybrid environments support, through virtual machines, web servers, computing and storage services.

There are some of the benefits involved in moving to Azure.

Security
One of the top benefits of Azure is its security features. The platform offers a number of physical, infrastructure and operational tools to secure your data and environment. One interesting feature is Secure Score. The platform’s Security Center uses machine learning to process data across the environment, detecting threats such as SQL injections and brute force attacks. In addition, the platform Availability Zones allows users to deploy multiple virtual machines (VMs) on multiple zones in a given region, distributing the risk of disaster.

Visibility
The platform enables to see the status of a project from different locations, thus allowing people in different regions to work on the same project. Therefore, Azure helps to make your organization projects geographically independent.

Reliability
Azure cloud ensures high availability, offering a 99.98% uptime. This feature is crucial for global organizations, which need to have teams working on the same projects from different geographic locations. The platform enforces reliability by using a load balancing. This useful feature distributes requests across the network in the case the server overloads the CPU. Moreover, it offers the ability to transfer control to a duplicate system in the event of disaster, by using ready-to-use failovers.

Scalability
One of the main features of Azure is the adaptability to scale according to the traffic workload, scaling easily up or down. The platform does it by creating an instance each time a web app is deployed. That means you can scale up the instance by adding up the servers assigned to the application. Moreover, Azure offers autoscaling in its Standard and Premium plans.

While there are several benefits on moving to the Azure cloud, a successful migration starts by proper planning. Read more about how you can ensure a successful Azure migration.

Critical Considerations for Azure Migration

Before starting your migration to Azure, there are some considerations you should keep in mind as we shall see:

• Performance and availability metrics—Azure provides offers a strong computing service, with advanced performance and availability metrics. However, some workloads, such as video encoding or Power BI workloads with frequent and large data transfers, can prove expensive to manage in Azure. In addition, sometimes new system architectures and designs may require additional application optimizations.
• Security and privacy—some sensitive data may present a security challenge if you are considering moving it to the cloud. Therefore, you should make sure that the security capabilities of the Azure cloud match the application governance, risk and compliance needs.
• Migration cost—calculating the workloads compute and storage needs can provide a good idea of how much the application migration can cost. Using a calculator, such as the one provided by Azure, can be a good start when determining the migration budget. However, the need to refactor or re-architect the application can add to the migration costs significantly.
• On-premises integration—one of the key features of Azure is its support of hybrid environments. That being said, you should consider how the on-premises and cloud applications will communicate to each other when moving to the cloud. Azure provides a solution establishing a secure connectivity to your on-premises server from Azure App Service.
• Authentication—unlike an on-premise environment, where you can work with windows authentication, when migrating you will need to enable authentication with Azure Active Directory.
• Shared database queries—in the case of cross database queries, the databases need to be in Elastic Pools, using Elastic Queries to query across the databases. However, Azure does not allow linked database queries, therefore requiring a re-architecture of the application.
• SQL server features—Azure SQL database does not support a number of server level features, for example a limited preview of SQL Managed Instance.

Wrap Up

Once you took into account all the considerations mentioned above, you can start building your cloud migration strategy. The first step for a successful migration is assessing your needs and applications to choose the right migration strategy and the cloud environment that fits you most. Azure offers support during migration, for example in this post from Azure’s blog, regarding assessment strategies.

Next, you should choose if you are going to use a public or hybrid cloud environment. Moving to Azure’s cloud is a best fit for companies choosing a hybrid cloud environment, since the platform offers special pricing benefits for hybrid cloud users.

There are more aspects involved in creating a successful cloud strategy. With the considerations mentioned in this article, you are off to a good start.