Microsoft Azure kicked off in February 2010; it is seen evolving as one of the leading cloud infrastructure service providers across the globe for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides various cloud services like computing, analytics, networking, and storage. It not only provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) but also supports multiple programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. Azure uses large-scale virtualization at Microsoft data centers worldwide, and it offers more than 600+ services.
It seems like the market has responded well to Azure. According to Statista, In mid-2021, there were a total of almost 16,000 products and services offered on the Microsoft Azure marketplace, and the majority of them were listed under the IT and management tools category. In the first quarter of FY 2022, Microsoft Azure’s revenue growth stood at a whopping 50 percent.
With 160+ data centers globally, Microsoft Azure accounts for one of the most prominent players in the cloud offering, thus unlocking the possibilities to remain competitive in today’s uncertainty. Organizations today are Migrating in-house applications to Microsoft Azure for the enticing benefits and long-term flexibility. Additionally, it eliminates most of the hardware and network equipment needed to operate in-house. But Azure Migration is not easy; the journey is challenging, with relatively many hurdles, and will demand quick resolutions. In this blog, we will discuss the basics of Microsoft Azure Migration.
Understanding Microsoft Azure Migration:
Azure’s popularity is increasing day-by-day as it is secure scalable and provides performance-efficient storage services in the cloud. This means if an organization needs to scale up or down its data storage capabilities, it can easily move the computing resources up and down as required by business needs and workload. Azure Migration provides a centralized hub to assess and migrate on-premises servers, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure.
When planning a migration journey, it is worth considering the pros and cons of the different migration models: Rehost, Refactor, Rearchitect, and Rebuild. Depending on the model that you pick determines the entire Azure Migration strategy. Microsoft also provides the best hybrid cloud solution in which some of the applications are on-premises, and others are on the public cloud. Microsoft also has one benefit of cross-cloud, where some services are built-in Azure while others are on some other cloud like AWS.
Some of the benefits of Azure Migration are Optimised costs, flexibility and scalability, enhanced security, compliance offerings, backup, recovery and failover, and simplified management and monitoring.
Why Microsoft Azure Integration
A key part of many Microsoft Azure solutions is planning how they will integrate with other systems and solutions and planning for the overall deployment. Before integrating applications with Azure AD, it is important to know where you are and where you want to go. Microsoft recommends a four-step Azure Migration process:
- Discover: Catalog your software and workloads
- Assess: Categorize applications and workloads
- Target: Identify the destination(s) for each of your workloads
- Migrate: Make the actual move
This process requires a current state assessment of the servers and the data. This means finding out whether the existing application is suitable to migrate to Azure or not. After that is the time for the actual migration process with the help of rapid lift-and-shift migration tools, all included in the Azure subscription at no additional cost. Azure provides a variety of storage tools and services for the migrated application.
Azure Storage Platform includes the following data services: Blobs, Files, Queues, Tables, and Disks. Security is one of the many advantages of using Azure for applications. It provides confidentiality, integrity, availability of customer data while also enabling transparent accountability. Migrating and maintaining your Azure deployment is crucial. Initially, Azure provided only the classic deployment model; now, it scaled to four deployment models.
One important area which can also be referred to as a benefit of Azure is its pricing model. Azure Cost Calculator is a free cost management tool that can help organizations estimate their cloud costs for new Azure deployments or variations of existing workloads. Azure Functions consumption plan is billed based on per-second resource consumption and executions.
Virtual machines, applications, and data can be migrated in one go, but it is advisable to migrate in phases. One of the best practices to implement Azure security is connecting individual networks and on premise networks to Azure Virtual networks with a VPN or a dedicated WAN link. This enables testing configurations before going live in the cloud and minimizes downtime during Migration. Also, connecting all the Azure Virtual Networks is important. IT governance teams and the cloud adoption team must ensure additional alignment during the migration process.
Even after the deployments are done, organizations need to monitor deployments and ensure that virtual machines and system performance are functioning as expected. Azure Monitor helps analyze VM performance, monitor processes, and map dependencies.
GS Lab – Microsoft Expertise
At GS Lab, we have expertise in engineering custom solutions by leveraging the complete Microsoft technology stack. In addition, we are Microsoft Gold Application Development Partner and a Silver Cloud Partner. With our expertise across the Microsoft ecosystem, we help our customers migrate applications and data to the cloud, build analytics solutions, and develop end-to-end solutions.
We recently helped one of the customer increase its RoI by 200% with the help of Azure. Our customer is a real estate giant who manages and trades in properties and offers investment services for the realty sector. They needed a one-stop solution to manage their portfolios. GS Lab helped the customer consolidate their data ingestion processes and present a comprehensive dashboard to their end-users. This solution allowed end-users to monitor and analyse their investments in real-time while increasing the accuracy of data points. Read the detailed case study here.
Author
Padmashree Godbole | Business Development
Padmashree Godbole serves as a Senior Business Development Executive at GS Lab. She works closely with our London office to grow business in the EU region. Her experience in entrepreneurship and marketing is helping GS Lab to expand our footprint in the areas of Product Engineering & Development and various other Digital Transformation initiatives.
