Azure Migration in a Nutshell
Azure migration involves transferring applications, data warehouses, desktops, and other resources to the Azure cloud. This transition offers benefits such as reduced IT operational costs, enhanced performance, and improved scalability of workloads. For businesses needing to retain some workloads on-premises for regulatory or operational reasons, hybrid Azure migration is a suitable option.
Mille Solutions assists both IT and non-IT companies in executing Azure migrations efficiently and with minimal risk.
- Azure Migration Process: Includes defining migration goals and scope, selecting a migration strategy, planning the project, conducting pilot and full-scale migrations, and monitoring and optimizing migrated workloads.
- Required Team: Comprises a project manager, business analyst, Azure solution architect, software engineer, database engineer, DevOps engineer, IT security specialist, and QA engineer.
- Cost: Azure migration costs typically range from $5,000 to $100,000, depending on the project’s complexity and application readiness. Use our online calculator for a personalized cost estimate.
Table of Contents
Azure Migration Steps
The Azure migration process depends largely on the number and complexity of workloads to migrate, the chosen migration strategy, and other factors. Below are outlined sample steps we at Mille Solutions take to complete Azure migration projects.
Step 1. Defining migration goals, scope, risks
- Eliciting business requirements and defining migration goals (boosting software resilience and performance, cutting workloads operational costs, etc.).
- Identifying workloads (applications, databases, data warehouses, desktops, etc.) to migrate to Azure.
- Identifying all sensitive information within the selected workloads to further plan appropriate security and compliance measures.
- Checking the compatibility of the to-be-migrated workloads with Azure and assessing their readiness for migration.
- Identifying risks of migrating particular workloads (e.g., long transfer time, issues with pulling data back to on-premises).
Step 2. Selecting an Azure migration strategy
Choosing an appropriate Azure migration strategy, according to the migration goals. Among the strategies Mille Solutions applies in its migration projects are:
- Rehosting (‘lift-and-shift’)
- Relocating workloads to Azure without code alterations.
- Quick and cheap Azure migration with limited cloud-driven capabilities (latency, performance, and scalability).
Best for: Workloads unlikely to be scaled and migration projects prioritizing short-term benefits (e.g., immediate reduction of on-premises infrastructure costs).
- Replatforming (‘lift, tinker and shift’)
- Moving applications to Azure after introducing minimal code changes and some enhancements with no architecture changes.
- Increased performance and easy scaling of the migrated apps.
Best for: Applications that experience load jumps and unstable performance.
Step 3. Azure migration project planning
- Estimating the Azure migration project (including migration ROI, TCO).
- Working out the backup and disaster recovery plans to mitigate migration risks.
- Setting KPIs for Azure migration (CPU usage, workloads’ response time, accessibility to end users, node switchover time, etc.).
- Choosing tools for automated Azure migration.
- Designing the target architecture and planning modifications for workloads under migration.
- Planning measures to ensure the workloads’ security in the Azure environment, such as:
- Encryption of data in transit and at rest.
- Data storage access restrictions (Azure firewall and network security groups (NSGs).
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and complex passwords.
- API patching.
- Composing a plan for Azure migration with prioritized workloads for each iteration.
Step 4. Running pilot Azure migration (optional)
- Provisioning the testing environment for the workload-to-migrate.
- Replicating a workload to Azure.
- Evaluating the results of pilot Azure migration, making modifications to the workload architecture, configuring the Azure infrastructure (if needed).
Step 5. Migrating to Azure
Migration activities typically include:
- Preparing a production environment, setting up DevOps processes and tools.
- Migrating the data related to the workloads under migration and the workloads themselves.
- Checking the workloads for functioning as expected after migration.
Consider Professional Azure Migration Services
Azure migration consulting
- Analyze your business needs driving Azure migration.
- Assess the workloads’ migration readiness.
- Develop a business case, including ROI and TCO.
- Create a detailed migration roadmap.
- Select best-suited Azure services for migrating the workloads.
- Advise on cost optimization of the migrated workloads.
Azure migration outsourcing
- Chooses an appropriate Azure migration strategy.
- Implements workloads’ modifications (e.g., applications’ refactoring).
- Migrates workloads to the target Azure environment.
- Decommissions unneeded workloads or their components.
- Sets up Azure monitoring tools to track the migrated workloads’ health, security, load, etc.
Azure Migration Cost Factors
The cost of Azure migration ranges between $5,000 and $100,000 depending on the project scope and the readiness of application for migration. Simple lift-and-shift transfer of one application to Azure will be around $5,000 while migration requiring application re-architecting will fall in the range of $20,000–$100,000.
Here are the factors that influence the migration cost.
Key Azure migration cost factors
- The type of workloads to migrate (applications, data warehouses, virtual desktops, etc.) and their complexity.
- Workloads migration readiness.
- Availability of relevant legacy workloads documentation.
- The complexity of workloads and their dependencies.
- The scope of workloads’ modifications required.
- Target deployment model (Azure public cloud, Azure Stack for private cloud deployment, on-premises + Azure deployment).
- Workload availability requirements.
- Testing efforts.
Key Azure post-migration cost factors
- Azure cloud infrastructure and services costs.
- Monthly/yearly support and maintenance costs for the migrated workloads and infrastructure that depend on:
- Needed storage and compute resources.
- Azure services employed.
- Physical location of data centers (Azure Regions), and other factors.
Roles on Mille Solutions Azure Migration Teams
Project Manager
- Works out a detailed plan for Azure migration that includes budget and time estimates, key milestones, risk mitigation plan, and more.
- Assigns tasks to the team members and supervises their execution.
- Sets and controls cloud migration KPIs and controls the quality of deliverables.
- Regularly reports to the project stakeholders on the Azure migration project state.
Azure Solution Architect
- Develops an Azure migration strategy and guides the technical team on its implementation.
- Plans architectural modifications for the workloads under migration.
- Selects Azure services.
Software Engineer
- Modifies the workloads or their components at the code level.
- Debugs workloads’ issues detected within performance testing, if any.
Database Engineer
- Advises on Azure database services, configures cloud database(s) and data warehouse(s).
- Carries out data migration.
- Implements data backup/recovery and fine-tunes database performance.
DevOps Engineer
- Integrates development and operation environments with the help of the infrastructure-as-code approach.
- Automates workloads deployment and testing, configures CI/CD pipelines.
- Configures tools for monitoring the migrated workloads’ health and alerting about the detected issues.
IT Security Specialist
- Ensures that the workloads deployed or developed in Azure conform to the organization’s security and compliance requirements.
- Provides security recommendations within each stage of the Azure migration process.
- Arranges network security, access control mechanisms, monitoring and event management for the migrated workloads.