Shiva Shastri Sr Product Marketing Manager, Azure Migrate—Product & Ecosystem.

Cost-effective and sustainable innovation.

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to stay competitive through innovations while managing costs. By leveraging the power of the cloud, organizations can achieve cost-effectiveness and foster sustainable innovation. By transitioning to Azure, any organization can achieve greater financial flexibility, operational efficiency, and gain access to innovations that provide a competitive edge in the marketplace. Collocating application resources and data is essential for optimal performance and return on investment (ROI). Once in Azure, secure and responsible AI can help you with insights and actions that lead to better outcomes while Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability will help you reach your net zero goals.

Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free platform for migrating to and modernizing in Azure. It provides IT resource discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities in a workload agnostic manner. You can run and monitor the proceedings from a single, secure portal and cutover to production in Azure when ready. At Build, we are excited to share several impactful Azure Migrate features to help you move your on-premises workloads to Azure efficiently: 

Application Aware migrations:

Starting today, you can group all the resources in your application and assess readiness together using Azure Migrate. The new application aware method of assessment provides technical and business insights (ROI/TCO) to help migrate entire applications with dependent workloads, as one.

You can easily identify and tag dependent resources that belong to an application and group them in the same “wave” to ensure resources stay together throughout the migration process. Once grouped, technical assessments and business case analysis (ROI/TCO) provide necessary insights at the application level to make informed decisions and eliminate surprises. This capability helps you with collocating your application resources to eliminate unnecessary data egress charges and get the best performance in Azure. Please see this blog for more details.

Refreshed user experience (UX): A new user interface coming soon in Azure Migrate will guide you through various stages of migration. The workload agnostic and guided flow steps the user through the various migration stages in an intuitive and seamless manner. During the assessment stage, Azure Migrate will present a choice of first and third-party tools to meet your specific workload needs and recommend targets in Azure that suit your migration strategy (IaaS/PaaS). The refreshed UX and application awareness capability together set the stage for accelerated migrations of entire applications to achieve your security and AI transformation goals.

Sustainability in business case (ROI/TCO): With the new sustainability capability in Azure Migrate Business Case, customers can view estimated carbon emissions savings when migrating on-premises resources to Azure — making sustainability a first-class consideration in cloud transformation. The new capability in Azure Migrate brings emissions awareness directly into the business workflow, helping IT, finance, and sustainability teams align on decisions that drive both economic and environmental value. Customers can compare estimated on-premises and Azure carbon emissions and savings by resource type.

Please review this blog for more details.

Moving to Azure gets you started on your sustainability journey. It is important to continue to monitor and optimize in Azure for additional benefits. The free “Azure Carbon Optimization” tool accessible directly on the Azure portal helps you minimize the carbon footprint of Azure resources. It offers granular emissions data for all Azure services and components of each service. The tool allows for the export of carbon emissions data to a csv file for use with other tools and has a REST API for integration. Further, an AI optimization engine in Azure analyzes resource utilization and provides suggestions to reduce carbon emissions, often aligned with cost savings. Recommendations to schedule uptime or shut down unused resources, right-size underutilized resources, move to more efficient SKU’s and use Azure spot VM’s are some of the outcomes. Please see this technical blog for more details on how you can achieve your sustainability goals in Azure.

Learn more

Learn more about Azure Migrate and get familiarized with the workload agnostic approach through this demo. For expert migration help please try our offers Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate. You can also contact your preferred partner or Microsoft field for next steps.  Get started in Azure today!