Azure Migrations are successful when you have the right strategy in place. In many cases, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to begin, what questions to ask, and how to implement them. While cloud migration services are unique—a strategy is always created in the same way.

Migrating to Azure is a significant undertaking for on-premise databases, VMware, and applications. However, many businesses make the switch without fully understanding what the potential pitfalls are.

If you’re new to building and deploying Azure applications, this article is here to help! Using this step-by-step guide, you will discover how to migrate your business to Azure successfully.

What is Azure Migration?

The Microsoft Azure cloud platform offers a wide variety of cloud services hosted in a network of data centers around the world. A wide range of these services allows organizations to design, develop, deploy, and manage their applications.

With Azure migration, organizations can optimize costs, secure assets, and achieve resilience. Operations and development teams can benefit from Azure-managed services by reducing operational overheads. For Azure migration to be successful, organizations should rely on tried-and-true approaches and strategies. With automated tools and guidance created specifically for migration projects, experts provide a structured step-by-step process for migrating workloads to Azure.

Migrating to Azure: Strategy, Assessment, and Planning

This Azure migration guide emphasizes that for it to become successful, it boils down to three key activities, such as a roadmap, an Azure migration assessment, and a step-by-step plan.

Strategy

Migrating is a complex process that requires a thoughtful strategy that addresses all aspects. Take these factors into consideration when planning your strategy: 

The next step is to create a realistic timeline that allows for meaningful milestones to be achieved along the way. 

Assessment

Can your applications run in a cloud environment? What benefits will the organization gain from the migration? No matter what, you should always ensure everyone is on the same page by informing all stakeholders and employees prior to the migration.

The following should be included in your assessment: 

With Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool, you can assess the readiness of your infrastructure for virtual machines. During migration, it generates a report that shows which workloads can be moved and if there are any issues.

Planning

You will need to do the following during this phase:

In order to ensure that everyone involved in the process understands their role, it’s important to set clear expectations for stakeholders.

Taking a Step-by-Step Approach to Azure Migration

Do you have trouble migrating to the cloud? It is recommended by Microsoft that you follow a migration process that can help you migrate to Azure successfully and optimize your new environment.

The Azure migration phases will be discussed in more detail below.

Step 1: Planning

Any Azure migration project should be evaluated to determine whether the current infrastructure can be migrated. Following that, your migration strategy should be aligned with your business goals, objectives, and processes.

Are you interested in increasing scalability, for example? Is improved performance what you’re looking for? It’s time to take the next step after identifying your desired outcome. 

Step 2: Identifying Your Resources

In context, these are both time and material resources that will be necessary to complete the migration process. The following should be evaluated:

Answering these questions before you migrate to the cloud provides you with sufficient time and information to plan and execute a successful migration.

Step 3: Conducting an Infrastructure Assessment

Checking the status of your existing infrastructure is the third step in fulfilling your Azure migration checklist.

You will be better able to determine the changes needed before the migration if you take an inventory of your existing IT environment.

Step 4: Preparing a Migration Plan

The next step is to develop a detailed plan for executing the actual migration process once all the necessary resources have been identified. All of these steps are designed to ensure success at every stage—including creating deadlines, assigning tasks, and reviewing processes and procedures. 

In order to complete migration work on schedule and on budget, it is important to have a clear plan in place before starting any work.

Step 5: Monitoring and Testing  

During each stage of execution, it’s crucial to monitor the progress of the migration plan. When you deploy new Azure applications or services, it is important to thoroughly test everything before going live.

It is imperative to identify any potential issues ahead of launch or roll-out in order to resolve them as soon as possible. With this, you can also minimize downtime and data integrity loss.

Step 6: Re-evaluating and Updating Post-Migration  

In order to execute an effective Azure migration, all systems should be reviewed post-migration. It will be necessary to update the software from time to time. If needed, you can apply patches to newly migrated code.

The goal is to ensure that all systems function properly after migration and perform optimally in their new environment. 

Choose a Reliable Cloud Migration Service

It is a challenge to move your on-premises application code to a cloud data center. Our highly skilled engineers at Laminar Consulting Service have extensive experience migrating software to secure, stable, and new platforms. 

As part of the migration process, our team will eliminate any weaknesses in your existing platform so you can trust the integrity of your new system. As a partner, we’re fully aligned with your business needs and are 100% transparent with our customers. 

To discuss the Azure migration step-by-step further, contact us at 888-531-9995 at Laminar Consulting Service today!

Cloud migration inevitably involves serious organizational changes. Internal supporters, like technical evangelists, and external partners guide you through it.

Organizational change and transformation prepare two traps: a technical failure and a non-technical adaptation of the working routines that your employees have difficulties anticipating.

Workflow Digitalization: The Limits of Customization

Sales management, candidate management in HR, labeling in manufacturing, finance reports generation — almost every workflow would nowadays find an automation vendor.

But every company is different. And most of the out-of-the-box solutions were created with a kind of common denominator in mind. They provide templates that an average business can use. The problem is, there is no such thing as an average company. Each workflow digitalization and automation needs a customization effort to some extent. Even though the new platform will be adjusted for the company staff to enable easy use, they still have to learn at least a new user interface.

Each migration is aimed at sustaining and facilitating efficient workflows. Thus, sometimes it is necessary to get rid of less efficient ones or come up with a new design for them. It may seem an edge case at first glance, but changing working routines may cause consequent insecurity among employees.

How to Get an Organization-Wide Support

Stepping out of the usual path in everyday duties may be a bit frustrating for your employees. They are worried that their working performance will actually drop instead of an expected increase. It can even come to a soft resistance.

That’s why you should obtain some supporters that can spread the word about the bright sides of new technology and enlighten about a necessary adaptation period. Technical evangelists and early adopters help you to prepare the rest of the company’s staff for the forthcoming changes and raise their commitment.

Technical Evangelists

Technical evangelists are employees with a strong technical background but highly sociable and possessing an informal authority in the company. They enjoy explaining new technologies to other folks. They are far from being nerds; they help people to understand how cloud migration works without overwhelming anyone with unnecessary details.

Technical evangelists are often social hubs. You would know them already from informal team events or can quickly find them. When approaching a technical evangelist, remember to talk about the advantages of the platform migration for the employees and focus less on the business numbers.

Early Adopters

While technical evangelists won’t be dealing with the new technology after the migration, early adopters will. Those are mostly the power users of a new platform, such as senior specialists and team leaders. Once you’ve convinced them, they will find a way to sell new digital workflow software to their colleagues.

Of course, early adopters need to hear about the same kind of advantages before they express their readiness to help you. They should bear a message that a cloud migration process has a destination beneficial for all employees.

An Organizational Change Is a Masterwork

When you decide to roll out new digital workflow solutions in your company, help your employees to feel secure about the forthcoming changes. The most novel technology won’t work as expected if your best employees leave the company due to insecurity. It will require a lot of effort to subvert their fears and resistance.

Since you need to concentrate on change management, you may consider outsourcing the technical part of the cloud migration. Laminar Consulting provides cloud migration services on any scale, from small businesses to big enterprises. We can assist you in project planning and implementation leaving you enough time and resources to deal with the other aspects of cloud migration.

Laminar helps you to focus on essentials. Simply scroll down this page for one of the contact opportunities.

Cutover, Staged, or Hybrid: Understanding Migration Types

Learn how to decide on the right type of cloud or data migration and choose between cutover, stages, and hybrid.

Cloud or data migration may become a breakthrough for your company. Each business needs a unique migration scenario to make this innovation work for a profit.

Before Drafting a Migration Project Plan

Your employees enjoined using the same CRM or ERP for years, even despite its quirks. But one day, the clumsiness of it grew unbearable for the business.

That’s how companies typically come to data or cloud migration. In a few lucky cases, moving the storage or database is enough. Why lucky? Because your employees won’t get involved, except for the developers and system administrators. When you have to replace the interface, too, it means a long adoption and a lot of learning for the end users.

To avoid pushing your people too hard and ensure technical success, you should first choose the right migration type. Doing so ultimately influences everything in your project plan: the schedule, the cost, people involved, vendors to contract, and of course, the final result.

Data Migration Scenarios

Different classifications are possible, but we are currently interested in one based on the project timing.

Cutover, Known as the Big Bang

How does cutover migration work? Company staff keeps working with the existing system, while a team or external partner develops a whole new one. Once the new platform is ready, you set a day when you cut off access to the old system and replace it completely with the new one.

Such a plan for cloud migration suggests switching your cloud technology with a single move. Thus, it has been proven to be a bit risky and deserves its second name: the Big Bang.

Staged Migration

This is definitely a more relaxed data migration strategy. With the staged migration method, you divide all users into groups and migrate their accounts in bunches. The first bunch—usually, the power users—will help developers catch the last imperfections and fix them before adopting the technology in the entire company.

This strategy has no strict timing and no “point of no return,” and should be a strong consideration by migration beginners. It works well for migrating email accounts since it rarely matters if everybody in the company uses the same email settings or not.

Hybrid Migration

With this migration method, you isolate independent features or workflows and migrate them separately. For instance, you move your calendar to a new cloud and keep using the old provider for email. Sometimes, companies run two systems in parallel, synchronizing the databases to ensure that all employees have access to the same data.

The hybrid approach may lead to confusion among end users. Not everyone can keep in mind which system does what and where one should enter new information.

Factors to Consider Before Migration

An efficient migration plan should evolve out of the considerations concerning timing, resources at your disposal, and specifics of the workflows that you’re migrating. A few basic questions that you should discuss with your stakeholders in advance:

Most of the answers depend on the company size. A large enterprise is more likely to have an experienced developer team. But it also bears more risks in case of a failed migration. These can be negated by adopting a new cloud gradually.

Smaller companies may lack development expertise, but they’re easier to move at once. Most likely, they don’t need a highly customized solution and can obtain a ready one to roll it out quickly.

Indeed, we propose a few basic questions to clarify before migration. Technical issues are specific to each company. For a secure cloud migration, we kindly recommend getting advice from Laminar, an established consultant with a proven track of trouble-free data and cloud migrations.

Doing business in the cloud creates competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. Learn five success factors to deploy a cost-efficient cloud strategy.

If you’re not doing the majority of your business in the cloud, you’re likely missing competitive advantages and cost-savings opportunities. More than 93% of enterprises are using a multi-cloud strategy, while 87% have a hybrid approach combination on premises.

Spending on cloud services and infrastructure increased 34% last year and it’s not stopping. Digital migration and transformation continue to be at the top of most business agendas worldwide in 2021.

Five Success Factors for a Cost-Efficient Cloud Strategy

A well-designed cloud application framework is the key to deploying successful cloud solutions. When you have the right infrastructure, your business runs smoothly, whether you have employees working on premises, remotely, or in a hybrid situation.

We employ these five core principles as part of designing a cloud cost optimization framework.

  1. Define Operational Objectives
  2. Reliable and Redundant Systems
  3. Secure Cloud Storage
  4. Efficient Resource Management
  5. Cost Optimization Cloud Services

Define Operational Objectives

The first step in creating a robust, reliable infrastructure to manage your data, apps, and business needs is to define your operational objectives. The better you understand your needs, the better you can optimize your investment. For example, keeping nonsensitive data in a public cloud while reserving sensitive data and mission-critical applications for the private cloud can help keep costs down.

It takes a careful analysis of your business use-case to determine best practices for your organization.

Besides determining your needs, your cloud strategy should also include:

Reliable and Redundant Systems

Downtime is not only a productivity killer, but there’s a financial cost as well. Gartner estimates that unplanned downtime costs an average of $5,600 per minute. That can range from $140,000 to more than half a million dollars per hour, depending on organizational size.

System monitoring, redundant systems, cloud connectivity, and automated backups are just the starting point for building a resilient IT architecture.

Secure Cloud Storage

When moving data to a cloud infrastructure, two-thirds of IT professionals say their most significant concern is security. A well-designed cloud application framework deploys best practices for security with a separate security layer.

Your deployment should include a focus on employee education. 99% of cloud security failures happen on the customer end and not with the cloud provider, according to Gartner.

Efficient Resource Management

Just making the move to the cloud won’t solve your business problems. It takes a holistic approach to develop your infrastructure, applications, IT, and resources to create an optimal environment.

Cost Optimization Cloud Services

Nobody wants to spend more than they need to get the results they’re after. One benefit of the cloud is that you pay for what you’re using now with the flexibility to add more capacity when necessary. Other cost optimization strategies include:

Rightsizing your computing services and optimizing them can be tricky. For example, there are more than 1.7 million possible combinations for cloud administrators when it comes to sizing instances.

Get Expert Help to Optimize Your Cloud Costs

If you don’t have the internal skills you need, the personnel to design your IT architecture, or the capacity to manage it, you’ll benefit from an expert set of eyes to help guide you.

When it’s time to figure out how to optimize cloud costs, experience can make a significant difference.  Contact the technology enablement experts at Laminar for a free consultation to see how you can optimize your cloud costs while futureproofing your business systems.

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