We are living during a time of rapid growth in AI technologies and seeing cloud complexity increase as a result of those advanced workloads, which makes it critical to update your infrastructure to stay competitive, improve security, and gain new capabilities through innovation. Microsoft has developed Azure Essentials to help you elevate the reliability, security, and ongoing performance of your cloud and AI investments.  

What is Azure Essentials?

Azure Essentials brings together Microsoft's best practices, product experiences, reference architectures, skilling, and our array of resources into a single destination to help you maximize the value of your investments on Azure. Built upon Microsoft and industry best practices, Azure Essentials offers detailed guidance, as a resource kit, tailored to your specific business scenarios. In addition, Azure Essentials also helps you enhance your existing deployments by providing a clear path to improve workload resiliency , security, and cost-efficiency as you manage your Azure investment.  The guidance within Azure Essentials emphasizes how you can leverage Azure products, tooling, and skilling resources to pinpoint areas of opportunity within your environments and organization so that you are better equipped to achieve business goals.

Azure Essentials equips your team with a prescriptive cloud journey blueprint 

Adopting the cloud is a multifaceted endeavor that requires strategic planning, meticulous execution, and ongoing refinement. Azure Essentials offers a comprehensive suite of guidance, resources, tools, and access to expert advice and best practices that facilitate a smoother and more efficient transition to the cloud, all tailored to meet your specific business needs and enable you to accelerate development and innovation. From migrating workloads to Azure, to modernizing existing apps, creating new AI apps, or revisiting your existing apps on Azure, Azure Essentials guides you through the cloud journey elevating reliability, security, and ongoing performance of your cloud and AI investments.

Azure Essentials guidance is structured into three stages to guide you through the cloud adoption journey: Readiness and Foundation, Design and Govern, and Manage and Optimize. With each stage broken down into actionable steps and tools, this staged approach allows for a methodical alignment of business and technology, ensuring that cloud solutions are effectively integrated and deliver ongoing value and growth. 

• Readiness and Foundation: establish a solid foundation by assessing your business needs and define where the cloud and AI can make the most impact in your business, align your technology strategy with business goals, understand your purchasing options, plan for security and data compliance, create a tailored Azure landing zone and prepare the necessary infrastructure, emphasize developer collaboration and build skills for cloud adoption.  
• Design and Govern: delve into project design and implementation focusing on workload-specific architecture design based for Windows Server, SQL Server, Linux, SAP, Analytics, and AI workloads, enhance developer productivity through tools, automated process, and streamline AI model development with MLOps, aligned with Responsible AI principles, supported by Azure Content Safety, build comprehensive security through the environment and workload, and safeguard compliance and privacy through tailored governance implementation.
• Manage and Optimize: enhance your environment with robust monitoring, advance AI integration, improve your security posture. scalable data-mesh for federated analytics, continuous learning, models updates and development processes, to create a virtuous cycle of innovation and efficiency, while ensuring ongoing performance, reliability and security in your Azure workloads and environments.

We're here to help

Azure Essentials guidance provides a comprehensive framework to navigate this complex landscape, ensuring your cloud initiatives not only succeed, but become catalysts for innovation and growth.

To further support your journey, we offer specialized assistance through our network of Azure advanced specialized partners. Microsoft partners can use Azure Essentials partner content hub to deliver differentiated solutions on core scenarios to you, including topics like resilience and security. If you have a Microsoft Unified agreement, your Microsoft Customer Success Account Manager (CSAM) can provide personalized guidance tailored to your specific data platform needs.

Embark on your cloud journey with confidence, knowing that you have the full support of Microsoft's expertise and Azure’s platform capabilities at your disposal. Together, we'll transform your data landscape, empowering your organization to derive unprecedented value and drive data-led innovation across the enterprise.

Leveraging both Microsoft and industry best practices, Azure Essentials offers detailed guidance tailored to your specific business scenarios. Additionally, when you use Azure Innovate or Azure Migrate and Modernize, you automatically gain access to the guidance and best practices within Azure Essentials. 

Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize are designed to simplify and accelerate your adoption and implementation of Azure. Azure Innovate enables AI-led transformation with comprehensive support, tools, and expert guidance to accelerate your implementation of AI, analytics, and application development. Azure Migrate and Modernize helps you build an AI-ready infrastructure by securely migrating and modernizing your on-premises infrastructure, applications, and data workloads. Whether you’re looking to securely migrate your Windows Server, SQL Server or Linux estate, open source solutions like PgSQL, or moving your VMWare, Oracle, or SAP environments to the cloud – we are ready to support your project.

Learn more about  Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernize  and Azure Essentials to understand how they can help you with cloud and AI adoption.  

Ready to take action? Connect with Microsoft Azure sales or reach out to a qualified partner.