Microsoft Azure offers a variety of cloud services hosted on a global network of data centers. Organizations can leverage Azure services to build, deploy, and manage applications at scale.
Azure migration can help organizations keep their assets secure, optimize costs, and achieve resilience. Azure managed services can help reduce operational overheads and free up time for development and operations teams.
To ensure Azure migration is successful, organizations should leverage proven approaches and strategies. Microsoft offers a structured step-by-step process for migrating workloads to Azure, with automated tools and guidance created especially for migration projects.
In this article, you will learn:
Embarking on a migration to Azure entails a strategic 4-step process:
Before starting your migration, perform the following steps:
Here are the primary migration options for each application. You should assess each application to determine which option is best for each use case.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Azure migration strategy
Reducing costs is often a benefit and an objective of organizations migrating to Azure. Migrating to the cloud can reduce costs compared to setting up and running on-premises infrastructure. However, this is not guaranteed, and requires building a business case in advance of migration.
After completing the first assessment, use Azure's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator to estimate the actual cost of hosting your project on Azure. You can factor into the cost estimation the organization's long-term financial goals. Compare TCO in Azure to the expected cost of running the same workloads on-premises—including indirect costs like manpower, hardware maintenance and replacement costs.
Azure Migrate provides a central platform for evaluating and migrating applications and data to Azure infrastructure. Azure Migrate can:
Dependency analysis is important for several reasons:
Learn more in our detailed guides to:
After performing discovery and evaluation, you’ll need to identify target systems and services in Azure.
If you are migrating existing VMware systems and relational databases, there is no need to create resources in Azure beforehand—Azure Migrate and Azure Database Migration Service can create the necessary Azure resources. For other workloads, you will need to set up Azure resources and then migrate your on-premises servers to them.
Ideally, you should start with smaller migrations rather than larger mission-critical workloads. This method can help you learn and try out the tools, processes, and procedures used for migration. Additionally, by starting small you can reduce risks when later migrating your larger workloads.
The following table provides general steps for migrating different types of resources to Azure.
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Migration Steps for VMware Resources |
Migration Steps for Databases |
Migration Steps for Other Resources |
Learn more in our detailed guide to migrating from VMware to Azure |
Learn more in our detailed guide to migrating databases to Azure
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Learn more in our Azure migration checklist |
The next stage, after migrating your services to Azure, includes a review of the implementation. During this phase you look for possible optimization areas. Below we explain two important optimizations: right-sizing resources in Azure and optimizing costs.
Azure services that offer a consumption-based cost model can be resized via the Azure portal, through PowerShell, or by using the Azure CLI. To correctly size a service, you first need to review its usage metrics.
You can find metrics data in Azure Monitor. This service lets you configure metrics collection for each analyzed service. The service then collects meaningful data based on workload patterns, gathered across a relevant period of time. Here is how to use Azure Monitor:
Performing ongoing cost analysis and review can help you achieve a balance between workload demands and costs. Azure offers several tools that can help you manage costs:
To get specific recommendations for cost savings:
Once you have successfully migrated to Azure, you need to monitor the performance and health of your workloads. You can do this using Azure Monitor.
To capture information from your Azure VMs, you need to install the Log Analytics agent, which supports both Linux and Windows VMs. Once the agent is installed, you can set up reporting and alerting processes.
Azure Monitor lets you set up alerts for a variety of data sources, including health metrics, specific metric values like CPU usage, autoscale metrics, and specific strings from log files.
To set up visibility and event logging for security events, you can use Azure Sentinel. This service offers Azure-native security information and event-management (SIEM) features.
Azure Sentinel provides artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for detecting, protecting against, and responding to security events. Your security team can use this information to triage alerts and prioritize incident response.
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP assists with lift and shift cloud migration. NetApp’s data replication tools SnapMirror® and Cloud Sync service will get your data to the cloud.
Learn more about how Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps to address the challenges of cloud migration in these Cloud Migration Case Studies.