Companies that move some or all of their IT infrastructure, workloads, and applications to the cloud are more agile, can work more efficiently and can reduce costs, but Azure cloud migrations can be problematic. Without careful research and detailed planning, many companies find the transition difficult and fail to achieve the full benefits.
Research from Gartner indicates that by transitioning to cloud IaaS, businesses can save up 50% on their infrastructure costs. However, researchers claim 80% of companies that perform a ‘lift and shift’ migration fail to achieve their expected cost savings. Gartner attributes this failure to a lack of careful planning and ongoing management, and estimates migrating to a cloud IaaS could end up costing some businesses 20% more than their current on-premises set up.
Careful analysis and planning are critical for successful Azure cloud migrations
Companies that take advantage of the cloud have the potential to be more agile, as they can benefit from the greater flexibility the cloud offers. There are significant cost savings as companies do not need to purchase and maintain on-premises hardware. That said, the cloud is not right for all workloads and applications.
Before you can even start planning, you need to be certain that the cloud is right for your business. You must carefully assess the reasons for moving to the cloud and what you hope to achieve. Azure cloud migrations require a considerable investment of time and resources, so you need to be sure that the benefits will be worthwhile.
One of the best ways of assessing a potential move is with a SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. If your SWOT analysis shows cloud migration is advantageous and the advantages of migrating infrastructure, workloads and applications to the cloud outweigh the risks, you can then move onto the assessment phase.
You will then need to carefully assess which applications are best suited to be migrated to the cloud and which are best staying where they currently are (if any). Not all applications are well suited for the cloud, and it may be best to keep certain applications and workloads running on your physical servers. This is often the case for legacy apps, which can prove extremely complicated to move.
You should perform a business-need migration assessment for each application, which should cover security risk, compliance requirements, operational requirements, and cost of moving applications.
When apps have been identified that are suitable for migrating, you will need to determine the infrastructure required to support those apps. You will then need to assess both the cost of migration and the total cost of ownership of the cloud infrastructure to support your applications and workloads. The costs can then be factored into the decision process.
Planning and executing Azure cloud migrations
Once you have identified the workloads suitable for migrating to the cloud, Azure cloud migrations can be planned out, and workloads and applications prepared for migration. You will need to ensure you determine the correct order for migrating applications to minimize disruption, and set timescales. You will need to determine which applications can be stopped during the move and which need to continue to function during the transition. You will also need to back up all data prior to executing your plan to ensure that, in the event of a problem, all data can easily be recovered.
Once your cloud infrastructure has been deployed and resources provisioned, you should run a failover test to make sure everything works as expected prior to migrating your data. After establishing everything is correctly configured, you can proceed with your data migration, followed by a period of thorough testing to ensure your applications and workloads are running correctly in the new environment.
Once Azure cloud migrations have been completed and applications tested, it’s important to implement a solution that allows you to manage your new cloud environment. You will need to monitor your cloud environment for vulnerabilities and security risks, keep track of cloud spending, identify areas for cost and performance optimization, and continuously assess and streamline your configuration to ensure you get the best possible return on your cloud investment.
How CloudHealth can help with Azure cloud migrations
Azure cloud migration planning can be simplified by conducting a CloudHealth Migration Assessment. The CloudHealth Migration Assessment allows you to efficiently assess different workloads and applications to determine whether they are suitable for migration to the cloud.
The CloudHealth platform will collect all relevant data and will assess the utilization or configuration of your servers.
Based on the information gathered on your on-premises environment, CloudHealth then applies this to the cloud and will calculate what the optimal cloud footprint should look like. Recommendations will be made on the number of virtual machines you need, factoring in redundancy to cater for CPU, memory, and disk.
CloudHealth will also provide details of the costs of running the virtual machines, savings that can be achieved, and the most cost-effective way of paying for those services (i.e. Azure Reserved VM Instances). Through the platform, you can optimize your cloud infrastructure across cost, usage, and performance, and govern your Azure cloud with automated policies.
The CloudHealth platform will continuously monitor your cloud resources and provide suggestions to ensure sustained optimal performance after Azure cloud migrations have been completed.
Check out our comprehensive comparison guide of the big three cloud providers and be confident you’re choosing the right cloud provider for your organization’s needs.
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