By Spencer Duke

The cloud isn’t necessarily new anymore, but businesses are still determining whether or not it’s the right move for them, and for good reason.

First, let’s look at the three cloud options available:

1. Public cloud: A public cloud is a type of computing in which a service provider (such as Microsoft, Google, or AWS) makes resources available to the public, allowing for scaling and resource sharing.
2. Private cloud: A private cloud works similarly to a public cloud, but over a private internal network and is only available to specific users.
3. Hybrid cloud: A Hybrid Cloud is a combination of public and private clouds, utilizing software to enable connection and communication between data and applications.

Today, we’ll be talking about the public cloud, specifically Microsoft Azure. In this article, you’ll learn:

• The top business drivers for a public cloud like Azure
• The top business and technical considerations before moving to the cloud
• How to perform an assessment using the Azure Migrate tool to determine your cloud readiness (and why an assessment is important)

The Top Business Drivers for Microsoft Azure

It’s critical that you first determine your reason for moving to the cloud. It can’t be because it’s what everyone is talking about or doing. Cloud has become a buzzword, and we are here to remove the buzz-wordiness and really dive into “why cloud?”

First start with honing on what you’re trying to accomplish by migrating to Azure? What is the business initiative that Azure will solve?

Questions can include:

1. Is our business expanding?
2. Are we trying to have more flexible remote workforce?
3. Are we trying to make our environment more resilient and highly-available?

The challenge is simple: if we take our existing infrastructure that we have on premise, including servers and storage, and we just take exactly that and we put it in Azure, we’re not really taking advantage of what Azure can do.

That said, let’s look at 4 main drivers: scalability, cost-reduction, security, and manageability.

Want to better understand if Azure is right for your organization? See if you qualify for a free Azure Migrate assessment today!

Cloud Scalability

Here’s a good use case.

Businesses are hungrier than ever for analytics and automation. A lot of companies are fully or at least partially remote, so you can’t simply walk down the hall to the Director of Sales and get the latest sales pipeline information. You can’t walk down the hall to HR and ask where we’re at in the hiring process. The list goes on.

That’s why reporting and data are so important today. If you're trying to combine data from different departments; for example your CRM and your accounting software, you can integrate these into a cloud-hosted business intelligence platform like PowerBI to help you gather data all in one place and make data-backed business decisions.

Azure is a feature rich platform. Make sure if you’re going to move there, you have a use case like the on above, so you can take advantage of the features available.

There’s a common understanding that if you move to the cloud, it’s going to be less expensive.

Cost: CapEx vs OpEx

Many businesses want to move to the cloud to reduce spend.

There’s a common understanding that if you move to the cloud, it’s going to be less expensive.

That’s not always the case. Let’s dive deeper.

If you move your existing infrastructure exactly as is, it may not be cheaper. There needs to be thoughtful analysis, planning and optimization of resources to take advantage of the consumption-based cloud model.

Things you need to consider when looking at cost include:

1. Is your business running 24/7?
2. What applications make sense to move?
3. How are my current resources being utilized?
4. How can we modernize to take advantage of a consumption-based model?

If you have resources that are used periodically, we can leverage automation within Azure. With those resources not being powered up all the time, and aren’t available, then we don’t need them incurring costs.

On the flip side, if we have resources that we know are 24/7, we can take advantage of reserved instance pricing.

All that said, it’s important to look at your data and applications, what’s running when, how much compute it needs, etc to see if financially the cloud is a viable option for you.

Is the Azure Cloud secure?

In a short answer, yes.

In a longer answer, it depends.

In terms of physical security, there’s absolutely an inherent benefit. Put simply, you're never going to build your own hosted infrastructure to the scale that public datacenters have.  The physical security includes gates, guard, cameras, and more.

In terms of technical security, this becomes something proactive we need to implement, manage, and continually optimize. Some tools for security optimization include Windows Virtual Desktop and securing that with MFA.

In conclusion, just sticking your data in Azure doesn’t make you secure, but it does open doors that you wouldn’t otherwise have had access to, and therefore you can drastically improve your security posture if you utilize these features.

In terms of physical security, there’s absolutely an inherent benefit. Put simply, you're never going to build your own hosted infrastructure to the scale that public datacenters have.

Azure’s Manageability

Another common conversation that we typically come across with smaller teams (and sometimes larger) is around manageability.

Clients will come to us wanting to move to Azure to minimize manageability. On-premises, you’re managing all the physical components including your own infrastructure, server(s), hardware (including the refresh cycles), the contracts, warranties, troubleshooting random issues, failed disks, the list goes on and on.

All that goes away when you move to the cloud. However, there is a learning curve in the beginning. It’s still a new system you must figure out.

Short-term you may have to spend some time with it, but long-term, you end up with a single pane of glass and better tools to see exactly what’s going on in terms of data and analytics inside your infrastructure. This type of reporting includes what your infrastructure is doing, what it's costing to run specific resources. There’s also added feature benefits like the ability to fail over and manage, disaster recovery scenarios.

The manageability of the platform is great, but let’s level the expectations. If your primary goal is to alleviate management from internal IT staff and free them up to do other things, just expect that learning curve, especially in the beginning,

See if Azure if right for you with an Azure Migrate assessment. See if you qualify for a free assessment today!

Who Should Be Involved in Your Decision to Migrate to Azure?

Who exactly should be a part of your discovery phase conversations?

Technology no longer sits just in the IT department, so while we often don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen, it’s important to involve key stakeholders from different departments and at the very least should include the CEO, CFO, and CTO/CIO (or whoever is your IT lead).

During the discovery phase, you’ll want to focus on two main things: the business use case(s) specific to your organization as well as the actual assessment itself. In other words, what is the data telling you?

The business use case is more important than running the tool. It's still very important to run the technical tool and get our cost analytics and data. But remember, Azure is a tool, and it wouldn't make any sense for me to implement a tool that isn't solving a problem for the business.

During the discovery phase, you’ll want to focus on two main things: the business use case(s) specific to your organization as well as the actual assessment itself. In other words, what is the data telling you?

The Top Considerations when Moving to Microsoft Azure

Ideally once we've talked about the business use cases, then then we need to look at our current environment. There are 3 main components to look at both technically and non-technically, and are all of equal importance.

Connectivity and Latency

Traditionally, if we're hosting our own infrastructure, our network infrastructure was largely housed in that office, which works well for the traditional client server applications. When we're looking at migrating that infrastructure to Azure, we want to know how our applications and services are going to be affected by that. This is because what we're doing is we're separating the client from the infrastructure that they're interacting with, and that can cause performance issues. Essentially, it could negatively impact the users’ productivity. and we want to really avoid that at all costs and figure out how we can overcome it.

When you go to move these things, you immediately create latency between wherever it was to where it's going in Azure. What we need to find out to know if Azure migration makes sense is looking at individual server roles, services and applications and seeing what latency and network requirements they have and how those can met by Azure. If not everything is compatible, a hybrid solution could work. Hybrid scenario - initial investment on IT infrastructure & connectivity, servers, etc. Biz requirements change you need more storage, remote users. Instead of another large capex, you could solve storage or compute, by putting that workload in Azure

We really want to figure out how our applications and services are going to be affected by that change, which brings us to our next point…

The End User Experience

The end user experience ties into latency because if latency is poor, that affects the end user. We need to figure out how will that negatively impact the department or company - whoever is using these resources? Are we creating a net new server and this is an upgrade or move to a different version or are we moving it as is? In relationship to end user impact and latency, does anything change in regard to accessing information? How are processes affected? What changes in usability are there? Do they need to log in to VPN, use remote app, etc? It’s important to note that adoption rate will be large factor in success/failure

The ideal goal is that the end user experience gets better, but oftentimes it's, it's kind of an afterthought and documentation was poor, or training or communication was poor. We want to make sure those things are at the forefront of our decisions to make sure that users can still connect and aren’t disrupted and have what they need to be successful.

Cloud Costs

Once we've overcome the technical components and understand how our end user experience will be affected, we need to look at costs. We can do this by running cost analytics inside Azure Migrate. During this assessment, we want to look at this new infrastructure we're going to implement and its features and see how we are going to benefit. If the pros outweigh the cons, then the costs might be worth it to migrate. You can also look at Virtual Machine sizing, storage sizing and rightsizing your environment based on your budget.

Next Steps for Migrating to Azure

At the end of the discovery and assessment, you can better understand your business goals as they relate to the cloud, technical limitations and requirements, and changes that need to happen.

What the assessment will tell us if we're seeing if the recommendations align with our performance requirements and budget. Once we have all that information and we have a path forward that gives us a solid foundation to the build a scope of work and a project plan

It’s critical to look at your potential cloud migration from both a business and technical perspective because those lines are becoming more blurred as time goes on. It’s imperative to make sure that your goals align with the technology you’re using.