Many organizations are starting to assess whether migrating to the Cloud is the right move for their business. An Azure Migration Assessment could be the first step in embarking on this journey.
A move to Azure may make sense for your organization if your existing infrastructure is nearing end-of-life, if your available capacity is having trouble keeping up with your demand, or if the requirements for availability, redundancy, or scalability are forcing you to change how your IT service provider is providing services to your users.
To understand if Azure is the right choice, you typically need three things:
- A comprehensive understanding of your current environment.
- Effective mapping of costs of running the infrastructure in Azure
- An understanding of the ROI associated with migrating to the Cloud.
In this blog, we’ll look at the process of completing an Azure Assessment, which will help you to determine if moving to Azure is the right choice for your business’s Cloud migration strategy.
The Azure Assessment & Migration Process
Planning a migration to Azure should follow the following process:
- Assess your current infrastructure so that you can understand your utilization and your application dependencies.
- Develop costing scenarios for both on-premises upgrades, and for deploying in Azure, to determine the ROI of migrating.
- Map out a migration strategy for each of your applications, to ensure a smooth process and to minimize disruption and downtime.
- Migrate your infrastructure to Azure.
Conducting an Assessment of Your Current Infrastructure
Many organizations, when considering the Cloud, often look at what they are currently running on-premise and try to map like-for-like in the Cloud. Then, they determine potential costing based off that analysis. However, your on-premise infrastructure has often been overprovisioned during initial construction to ensure there is room to grow without having to add additional costly capital expenditures. Thus, a like-for-like comparison between on-premises and Cloud is not going to be accurate.
But, by completing an Azure migration assessment, you can see what resources you’re currently using and you’ll be able to capture the data that you need to make an informed decision about how much Cloud capacity you’ll need.
An Azure Assessment can help you understand the following:
- Your actual resource utilization, based on a 14-day analysis.
- Your application dependencies, so you can work out an informed migration plan and identify any low-hanging fruit.
- Your security details, such as your firewall and connectivity rules.
- Your true costing in Azure, with the ability to build out various scenarios, based on variations on selected hardware.
- Licensing considerations (such as Hybrid Use Benefits)
How is the Azure Migration Assessment Completed?
An Azure Assessment is completed by running small agents on your physical or virtual server nodes. These agents collect data for 14 days, which is sent back to a central server over HTTPS settings. It’s important to note that no personally identifiable information (PII) is scanned during this process, and that all data is anonymized in the database that is created for this purpose.
What Happens After the Azure Migration Assessment is Completed?
After the Azure Assessment is completed, you’ll be provided with a summary of findings, which includes:
- Virtual machine recommendations,
- Current hardware bottlenecks,
- A detailed list of your applications and their security details,
- A summary of each server’s readiness for Azure, with a breakdown of any important issues that need to be addressed,
Some of the issues that may be identified during the Azure Assessment include which of your servers are running an out-of-date Operating System that isn’t supported in Azure (Windows or Linux), which of your servers might be running a 32bit OS, instead of the necessary 64bit, which of your servers might have an older version of .NET that will need to be updated before migrating, which of your servers have unsupported disk configuration, or other similar problems.
The Cost Breakdown of an Azure Migration Assessment
The summary of findings during the Azure Assessment will also include an annualized breakdown of the costs of hosting your infrastructure in Azure. In this section of the findings, you’ll not only get a like-for-like option (which basically duplicates your current on-premises infrastructure set-up), but you’ll also see an optimized migration option, which shows you the resources that your IT infrastructure actually needs. By optimizing your environment in this way, you could save 20 – 50% (or more) each year, as the example below shows:
Like for Like Option:
Optimized Option:
Sign Up for Your Azure Migration Assessment Today
Once the Azure Assessment has been completed, you’ll be able to make a truly educated decision on whether Azure is a good choice for your business. So why not get started with your Azure Assessment today? Contact our team of Azure experts to learn about our Azure Assessment offers, or, for more information on an Azure Assessment, check out our recent on-demand Azure Assessment webinar.
Comments