With over 60+ announced Azure regions across the world, more than any other cloud provider, we aim to provide customers with options to select the region that best suits their needs – whether that need is based on data residency or compliance requirements, service offerings, technical and regulatory considerations, or just being closer to their customers. As we increase the number of new regions across the globe, and expand resiliency options with new Azure Availability Zones, we recognize the need to provide customers with the ability to move their IT resources to regions of their choice.
At Microsoft Ignite this week, we are announcing Azure Resource Mover, a new free service in preview that enables customers to move multiple resources across public Azure regions to support their ever-evolving business needs. Azure Resource Mover greatly reduces customer time and effort needed to move resources across regions by providing a built-in dependency analysis, planning, and testing that ensures the resources are prepared to move and then successfully moved to the desired region. Azure Resource Mover also provides a seamless and consistent single pane of glass experience that allows move orchestration for a range of Azure resources (Azure VMs, Azure Virtual Network, Azure SQL DBs etc.).
“The automation and single-click move capability of the Azure Resource Mover allowed us to significantly reduce the time and effort needed to move IT resources across regions,” said Adam Iqbal, capital markets Azure project lead at Accenture. “The ability to rename resources and customize IP addresses in the target location are other important features that helped to streamline and simplify the process."
Azure Resource Mover, available through the Azure portal, PowerShell, and SDKs with any Azure subscription, can be used to support a number of key business needs such as:
- Take advantage of new Azure region expansions to be closer to their end customers to reduce latency
- Increase availability and resiliency of their applications by moving to regions with Azure Availability Zones
- Meet the data residency and compliance requirements necessary for operating their businesses
- Consolidate workloads into single regions to support mergers and acquisitions
Over the last year we have announced new datacenter regions in Qatar, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Italy, New Zealand and our latest addition in the United States with West US 3 in Arizona. With Azure Resource Mover, customers have the ability to plan ahead and take advantage of these new regions whether that is to meet compliance or data residency requirements or better serve their customers.
Moving between Azure regions with confidence
Azure Resource Mover streamlines the move process by identifying and analyzing any dependencies needed to plan the move. Customers can plan and test ahead as many times as needed so that when fully prepared, the move can be staged to happen during a planned scheduled downtime event. This enables customers to have full confidence when planning large scale moves.
Customers can rest assured that all moves are orchestrated within the highly secure and encrypted Azure environment and Azure Resource Mover provides the user with the validation that the move is final prior to committing the move to the target region. The resources at the source region are left intact until the final move is completed so customers.
Moving multiple resources simultaneously through a single pane of glass that abstracts the underlying technology elements and following a consistent experience significantly reduces touchpoints, so there is less time spent learning various required for the move and can reduce overall time for the move from months to weeks or days depending on amount of data.
We continue to hear from customers of the importance of having the flexibility to take advantage of Azure regions. We have designed Azure Resource Mover with customer feedback and experience in mind and invite customers to learn more about Azure Resource Mover here and leverage our technical documentation on how to get started. Azure Resource Mover currently supports moving resources from any public region to any other public region. The support to move across sovereign clouds will be available in the coming months.