Managing all your IT infrastructure, services, and application with on-premises systems can be challenging as you scale your business. Moving your legacy systems to the cloud is the right choice, and Azure is your perfect match. Making the big move needs precise planning, and let’s see in this article what is required. 

Cloud data migration is a comprehensive change at the organizational level and it requires meticulous planning. Here are some steps to develop your own Azure migration strategy. 

Question yourself and answer them 

Asking yourself some basic questions from a business point of view and answering them is the step to Azure migration. Here are the questions to ask yourself and answer. 

• Why do you want to move to the cloud? 
• What do you want to move to the cloud? Is it your entire IT infrastructure or only a part of it? Do you want to keep your critical data still in on-premises systems? 
• What is your budget? 
• What would be the ROI after moving to cloud? 
• What are the business benefits by moving to cloud? 

Survey your IT infrastructure and assess them 

Identify each and every part of your IT systems, and prepare an inventory list. This helps to prepare your organization ahead of moving the applications and IT workloads, and ensure nothing is missed out. Next, you need to evaluate the IT components. Then, take the cloud migration assessment to know your Azure readiness. Review and assess your on-premises workloads to check if you need to scale your applications in the future. 

Make use of the handy Azure migration tools 

Here are some of the tools from Microsoft to make your migration easier. 

• Azure Pricing Calculator 

This tool helps to estimate your workload capacities while running on Azure. It scans your current environment and generates a computational model based on Azure services. The tool also automatically calculates the pricing for the IT workloads that you’ve chosen to migrate. 

• Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 

This is a complete tool to assess your IT inventory and get quick reports. It is a powerful assessment and reporting tool to simplify your migration planning. MAP provides actionable insights to accelerate your IT infrastructure planning and simplify desktop and server migrations. 

• Azure Migrate Tool 

You can use this tool to evaluate the compatibility of on-premises systems running on Azure. The tool helps to get an overview of migration costs and a visualization of the involved dependencies. You can also estimate the size of your virtual machines while migrating to Azure. 

During deployment 

Ensuring data security during the migration of on-premises infrastructure to Azure is critical. Making sure that your apps and workloads keep running even after the migration is important. You can use the Azure Site Recovery to check that those 2 conditions satisfy. It is used to duplicate workloads from the source location to a testing location. This guarantees business continuity in case of any outage. 

Post deployment 

Once the IT infrastructure has been moved to the Azure cloud, you can start to withdraw the resources at on-premises. But don’t hurry up to shut down all your physical servers. Make sure that the IT systems stay functional on the cloud for a while. Then, you can disconnect cloud systems and on-premises systems to complete the migration. Azure provides diverse built-in reports in terms of utilization, application usage, security, etc. You can even customize the reports to filter users viewing your applications from different geographical locations. 

At Deevita, we’re talking about IT every day. We help businesses like yours to develop IT strategies and implement IT solutions. Any enterprise planning to go ahead with a complex cloud migration needs expert help. The extensive experience in Azure is the highlight of Deevita. 

Looking for a trusted provider to migrate your IT systems to Azure, or to carry out more complex projects? Request a consultation with Deevita’s cloud experts and get the value from cloud technologies. Integrate Azure into your business network and move your applications and data to Azure with Deevita!