As the demands of the modern market continue to evolve, more and more companies are starting to realize that their current infrastructure is not suited to keep up with the market and its requirements. And cloud management refers to the exercise of control over public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure with the right resources and services.
A well-designed cloud management strategy helps IT professionals control dynamic and scalable computing environments. Thankfully, a quick and effective solution to this challenge is found in Microsoft Azure Cloud, a leading provider of cloud computing services. It is one of the leading cloud platforms with offerings that include; Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
So as companies brace to move to the cloud, there is growing interest in Azure cloud migration. If you too are planning such a move, here are some best practices to help ease the process for you.
- Integration: While integrating the company’s infrastructure with the cloud, one must not forget to ensure data security and to see to it that all the requisite workloads, support apps, etc. are operational. You can use the Site Recovery service to ensure business continuity during the migration process.
- Account for the dependencies: Any organization’s systems, irrelevant of the organization’s scale or the industry, make use of a variety of apps that are linked to or connected to other sources. This translates into dependencies; during the strategizing phase, it is of vital importance to account for such dependencies and connection configurations to prevent service interferences.
- Downtime: We understand that nobody likes or wants downtimes, but the nature of the migration process is such that you will face downtime sooner or later. While there is no way around this, what you can do is make sure that you precisely analyze and schedule the downtime for every migration step in such a manner that allows you to minimize the toll such downtime would take on processes and operations.
- Take care of the data requirements: One of the biggest reasons why companies now want to switch to the cloud is because of the data constraints presented by the current infrastructure and data center. There can be other concerns as well, such as speed, stability, etc., of course, but that is beside the point. What you need to keep in mind here is that the concerns that drove the decision to migrate to the cloud can also render the migration process much more complex. To successfully deal with such issues, the company must also plan for these constraints during the evaluation as well as the migration processes.
- Governance: Depending on the industry and the individual set of standards a company wishes to uphold, ensuring compliance and governance may be a vital aspect of ensuring the success of the entire migration process. In such a case, the relevant teams, i.e. cloud migration team, IT governance team, etc. must be on the same page about the migration strategy and process.
Switching to Microsoft Azure Cloud is decidedly a big change for the organization as well as its employees. Hence, experts all over the world advise that companies approach the transition with care instead of diving into it headfirst without careful planning and robust strategies to support the process. So, make sure you take the time to carefully ask and answer vital questions about the reasons for the move, the benefits, the ROI, etc. Then evaluate your current infrastructure and capabilities to better understand how the decision to undertake the process of application migration to Azure will benefit your organization. And if you find yourself needing help with the process, there are plenty of expert service providers in the market to assist with the project.
