Forum Discussion
azure newbie
To add to what the others mentioned, you also need to look at what you actually need "in the cloud" and why. AD, print servers, and file servers, to a degree, should really stay on premise, unless you can clearly show a business gain (e.g. money saved, improved uptime, etc.).
What are the contingencies if they lose internet service? Are you also recommending they get a second ISP and the hardware required to perform a failover? Do they have enough bandwidth to support sending 50MB documents to a print server (which is then sent right back to the printer on site...)? What sort of activity do you see on the file server? Do you have a VPN solution that can connect to your Azure virtual network so clients can access the file server? How will you backup that file server? Similar questions should be asked of your SQL servers. What sort of bandwidth do you need? How will your applications perform with the added latency between the local clients and Azure?
So unfortunately, as you can probably tell, it's not as easy as "getting a quote" for moving an entire infrastructure. For me, it helps to think of it more as moving to a datacenter/colo than moving to "the cloud". When you're moving to or between datacenters/colo's, there's analysis, planning, ROI projections, and a thousand other steps in preperation, and the same is true when you're moving to Azure or any other platform.