Upgrading your infrastructure is essential to staying competitive, enhancing security, and fostering innovation. Migrating and securing your Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux server estates to Azure provides an agile platform for improving performance and resilience. This journey requires thorough planning, execution, and ongoing management.
Azure Essentials provides a roadmap for secure migration
We recently introduced Azure Essentials to enhance the reliability, security, and performance of your cloud and AI investments. Azure Essentials combines Microsoft’s best practices, product experiences, reference architectures, skilling, and a variety of resources to help you maximize the value of your Azure investments.
Our three-step process for secure cloud migration includes establishing a solid foundation and readiness for migration, designing and deploying with governance, as well as managing and optimizing deployments. Let's explore these steps and see how Azure Essentials can facilitate a secure migration to the cloud.
Step 1: Establishing a solid foundation and readiness for migration
- Discover your IT estate and set your migration strategy. To start a successful Azure migration, first prepare your organization and cloud resources. Begin with a detailed inventory of your IT estate, including interdependencies and performance needs. Develop a comprehensive strategy, considering your migration approach and tools. Utilize Azure Site Recovery for VM replication and migration, Azure Database Migration Service for SQL Server migrations, and Azure Migrate for comprehensive planning and execution. Also, consult our Migration preparation checklist and Migrate Overview to ensure all readiness activities are covered. By following these steps, you'll be well-prepared for a seamless transition to Azure.
- Prioritize your security and compliance planning. Cloud security is a continuous journey of incremental progress and maturity, so addressing these requirements early is crucial. Security serves a dual purpose: reducing organizational risk by increasing assurances for all data and systems and enabling business goals as digital transformation becomes essential for competitiveness, relevance, and growth in a hostile threat environment. This involves continuously identifying how security and identity technology can support your business and mission. It's also important to recognize that risk mitigation is a shared responsibility among business asset/workload owners, technology teams, and security teams. Refer to our Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for guidance on security processes, best practices, models, and experiences to reduce risks and enable secure, continuous work from anywhere. Use the secure methodology to guide the ongoing improvement of your security program.
- Establish your platform landing zone. The next step is to establish your platform landing zone, a pre-configured environment for efficient cloud management. Landing zones ensure that your workload deployments have baked-in guardrails for agility and maintain compliance with enterprise security and governance requirements. By setting up your environment efficiently, you enhance workload resiliency and security, automate environment deployment, and accelerate migration, innovation, and time-to-market.
- Leverage financial best practices to manage your cloud spend. As you navigate different milestones in your cloud journey, financial and pricing considerations will evolve—from understanding Azure pricing and estimating project costs to budgeting for services and optimizing expenditures for deployed workloads. FinOps is a crucial part of this evolution. “FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.” (FinOps Foundation Technical Advisory Council) . To get started or advance or FinOps practice visit FinOps on Azure. Additionally, to help you reduce the costs of running your workloads visit Azure Hybrid Benefit. This Azure offer helps organizations accelerate their cloud adoption and maximize their savings by applying discounted rates and granting flexibility to their Windows and SQL server licenses with active Software Assurance or subscription. It is also applicable for RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions.
- Upskill your teams and set them up for success. The final stage of the Readiness and Foundation step is skills assessment and training. To enable a successful migration, you’ll want to set your teams up to successfully migrate to innovate on Azure. Consider skilling courses for Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux to ensure your team is prepared for the migration and invest in skilling your people through our Virtual Training Days and Azure Credentials. Azure offer helps organizations accelerate their cloud adoption and maximize their savings by applying discounted rates and granting flexibility to their Windows and SQL server licenses with active Software Assurance or subscription.
Step 2: Designing, deploying, and ensuring governance for your migration
- Adopt architectural best practice guidance. Before you begin the actual migration, you’ll want to design your workload architecture. Adopting architectural best practices will help you make design decisions to optimize your workloads for reliability, security, performance, and cost. It will also ensure that you jump start your migration with clear guidance based on real customer implementations because you’ll leverage best practices based on the experience of thousands of other customers. Start by formulating a plan to deploy application-specific resources to a specific subscription and design a dedicated virtual network for the workload. Use the migration assessment tools to conduct dependency analysisin Azure Migrate and Modernize. Next, you’ll want to design the architecture for an application landing zone. Regardless of which Azure landing zone reference implementation you use, you’ll need to perform specific tasks to prepare your landing zone for a successful migration project.
- Assess, test, and deploy your cloud workloads. Next, assess your workloads to understand their readiness for cloud migration. Before migrating a workload, assess the individual assets to determine their suitability for migration. Finally, evaluate the readiness of your workload and plan for the migrated state. Once this is complete, begin the technical implementation of the migration. Use architecture and assessment materials from the first phase to start deployment and problem remediation. Then, replicate the servers to Azure, prepare them for migration, and run technical tests. This phase is the most technically demanding, requiring an understanding of how your services operate together to ensure smooth deployment. By the end of this phase, you should have high confidence that your workloads are ready to operate successfully in Azure.
- Ensure governance for your cloud deployments. Then, you’ll want to establish proper governance for your cloud deployments. Effective governance regulates cloud use, mitigates risks, and streamlines interactions. It aligns cloud use with the broader strategy, helping achieve business goals while preventing risks. The Govern section of the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) provides a structured approach for cloud governance in Azure. It covers key categories including regulatory compliance, security, operations, cost, data, resource management, and AI.
- Migrate to be AI ready. If you’re looking to utilize AI capabilities in the future, now is the time to prepare. There are three AI-specific considerations for migration: how to gain agility to build, model, and run GenAI solutions at scale; how to streamline data for optimal AI cost, performance, and latency; and how to secure and govern AI to meet compliance and resilience needs. Start by building a centralized AI-ready foundation for your data-rich, compute-intensive AI app(s) while ensuring robust configuration, networking, and compliance. Next, be sure you have the agility to scale as you grow. That means having a scalable, secure, and resilient cloud foundation. Finally, you’ll want to migrate your infrastructure and collocate your data in the same place as your AI solution as this is proven to optimize the cost and performance of AI.
Step 3: Managing and optimizing deployments
- Proactive resiliency for critical workloads. Cloud migration is a foundation for transformation and growth. But to achieve success you need to address its biggest challenges: security, resilience, and cost management. At Microsoft, we look at building and optimizing your cloud environment and workloads as a shared responsibility. We can help you optimize the reliability and security of your environment once you have migrated your workloads to Azure by providing design guidance in the Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) and ongoing recommendations in Azure Advisor to ensure your application architecture is optimized for your purposes.
- Establish monitoring and security controls. Microsoft security solutions such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for XDR, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps provide a comprehensive, end-to-end security solution. We protect any compute resource, whether it’s on premise, hybrid, or multi cloud environments including AWS and GCP. We also provide protection all the way down to your databases, storage, and service layers like networking and resource management.
- Management and optimization of your cloud and AI investments. You’ll also want to ensure you are optimizing your cloud and AI investments, constantly. That includes benchmarking, sizing, managing cost and reviewing and enhancing your cloud workloads - Azure Advisor and Microsoft Cost Management make optimization easier with timely guidance and recommendations based on your existing deployments. Leveraging Copilot in Azure portal to identify new areas of optimization is another way we are helping you maximize your investments.
- Continuously check and improve your cloud workloads. Finally, you’ll want to continuously check and improve your cloud workloads architecture. The Azure Well-Architected Framework provides guidance to help you run high-performing Azure workloads that continuously achieve business value over time.
We're here to help you succeed
Migrating to innovate on Azure is about transforming your business to become more agile, secure, and productive. Azure Essentials provides the foundation for this journey, elevating the reliability and performance of your cloud and AI investments. With Microsoft Essentials, you can embark on your migration with confidence.
Learn more about Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Essentials to understand how they can help you achieve secure migrations.
Ready to take action? Connect with Microsoft Azure sales or reach out to a qualified partner.
Check out the following resources to explore further:
Migration resources: Build a business case for migrating to innovate with AI | Azure Migrate Overview | Migration tools | Migration FAQ
Landing Zone Resources: Prepare your landing zone for migration, Landing Zone deployment options
ISV considerations, Get landing zone help, Landing zone FAQ
FinOps Resources: FinOps Framework |Assessments | FinOps Review, | Azure Pricing and FinOps
Pricing Resources: Azure Pricing Calculator, Azure Hybrid Benefit - Hybrid Cost Calculator | Microsoft Azure
Skilling Resources: Azure Fundamentals course, Leverage skilling Plans on Microsoft Learn for Windows Server, SQL Server, Linux , as well as training on Mastering Essentials of Azure, and our Virtual Training Days Azure Credentials
Microsoft
