Businesses are increasingly turning to the cloud to streamline their operations and reduce costs. Migration to the cloud enables better flexibility and scalability, improves the security posture of the organisation, helps move from CAPex to OPex, as well as improve the user experience of the customers.
According to Gartner, 70% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2024. However, cloud technology is not only for enterprises. It is feasible for businesses of all sizes and industries to migrate to the cloud, with it being one of the most transformative projects a business will undertake.
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The Azure Migration Roadmap
- Define Business Objectives: Before any business undertakes a cloud migration project, they need to define what the objectives are for the business.
- Evaluate the Digital Estate: The digital estate is comprised of IT assets that power business processes, such as virtual machines, servers, applications, and data. Taking inventory of the digital estate helps choose the most effective deployment model or migration strategy.
- Define Cloud Migration Strategy: Cloud realisation helps in evaluating assets to define the migration strategy for each asset. The five common methods of rationalisation are: Rehost, Refactor, Replace, Retire, Retain.
- Decide on Cloud Deployment Model: Businesses need to decide on the right cloud deployment model for them. For on-premises applications and workloads, there are three primary cloud deployment options: Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud.
- The Migration: Every migration is different, but it should always be an incremental approach, where one workload is migrated at a time. Despite taking more planning and time, this approach reduces myriad technical risks.
- Secure the Cloud Environment: Businesses need to create processes and implement controls to ensure their cloud environments are secure. Some of the areas of security that businesses need to consider are access control, security operations, and asset protection.
- Establish Governance Plans: Governance is an iterative process, and every business will have its own compliance and governance requirements. These regulations will outline what governance measures your cloud environment will need.
- Manage Cloud Costs: Businesses need to implement cost controls and manage their cloud costs, to not run an unexpectedly large bill. They can view their cloud spend by service or resource and set a daily or monthly budget.
The Simplex Proposition
At Simplex, our Azure Migration and Modernisation services helps accelerate an organisation’s cloud journey with expert help at every stage – whether they are looking to move their on-prem SQL/Windows Server deployments into the cloud, deploy an Azure Virtual Desktop environment, or develop a Proof-of-Concept in Azure for a complex deployment.
Additionally, our partnership with Infinigate helps subsidise the investment of adopting the cloud, including funding for complimentary design and implementation as well as PoC licenses. While migrating on-premises services to the Azure cloud has numerous benefits, businesses often fail to realise their full potential due to poor optimisation. For organisations that already has workloads on Microsoft Azure, we offer a managed service which allows customers to save up to 40% on consumption costs with a FinOps solution to optimise cost, security, and resource management within Azure environments.
DOWNLOAD OUR COMPLIMENTARY CLOUD MIGRATION PLAYBOOK
Migrating to the cloud can transform the way your business operates and enable you to gain a competitive advantage, whilst futureproofing your growth. However, a poorly planned and executed migration can cause ongoing problems, increased spending, and a poor user experience.
Working with a trusted advisor is more cost-effective and efficient, and reduces the risk associated with migration, such as loss of data or downtime. Using industry best practices, our experts enable organisations to assess their existing IT infrastructure and migrate to Microsoft Azure cloud or optimise the existing workloads on Azure.
