Migrating to Microsoft Azure represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs
Published: Oct 30, 2024
At Petri.com, we are very familiar with the Azure infrastructure and setup and can offer insights and experience to help organizations make the most of this enterprise-grade cloud environment. As such, we felt it prudent to explore the key benefits of migrating to Azure, the processes involved, and the challenges you, as a system or IT administrator may face along the way.
Organizations and institutions worldwide are constantly exploring ways to optimize and strengthen their IT infrastructure. One of the most fervent trends in recent years has been the migration from on-premises systems to cloud environments which offer unparalleled security controls, flexibility and agility, traits which organizations strive to achieve in the wake of digitization.
Among the numerous cloud platforms on the market, Microsoft Azure is one of the leading and most recognizable choices, providing IT and system administrators with a plethora of advantages from improved performance to cost optimization.
Before exploring the specifics of how to perform an Azure migration, it’s worth taking note of how digital spaces for IT and system administrators are changing. With the advent of new technologies, prolific cyber threats, and recent innovations in search engine AI and software, among a whole host of other advancements, the way we all manage and utilize data is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Digital transformation, particularly post-pandemic, has illustrated the need for scalable and resilient IT solutions.
Not only must organizations adopt a multi-layered approach to the security of their assets, data and systems, but they must find a solution that can adequately and efficiently scale as their business model and workforce changes, particularly when expanding internationally. An Azure cloud platform gives them all of that scalability and security, providing organizations with ample room to customize workflows, reinforce security appropriately, and future-proof their operations as they grow.
The Azure cloud migration process involves moving all of an organization’s incumbent digital assets, workloads, services, databases, and files from a legacy IT infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The process can be convoluted and complex, but when planned and executed correctly, the short- and long-term benefits can be tremendous.
In the long run, organizations will find that a secure Azure cloud platform gives a firm plenty of stability and adaptability while empowering its workforce with tools that can streamline workflows, improve productivity, and provide long-term cost savings.
Here is a brief overview of how to migrate your incumbent IT infrastructure to a secure cloud environment hosted by Azure.
Azure cloud migration offers numerous advantages, but it does pose some potential challenges if not appropriately managed. Most data migration challenges can be prevented by using the right tools provided directly by the Azure platform. Some of the challenges include (but are not limited to):
A primary driver for organizations migrating to the cloud is the potential for substantial cost savings.
With Azure’s flexible payment model, businesses can reduce capital expenditure on hardware and infrastructure, minimize ongoing maintenance and upkeep costs, optimize their workloads, and scale their resources with more flexibility.
Azure is a cloud computing service that allows organizations to only pay for what they need when they move workloads. By moving to Azure from an on-premises infrastructure, or by adopting a hybrid model, organizations can achieve greater financial freedom and flexibility via an operational expense model.
Cloud computing via Azure allows organizations to offer flexible resources and innovate with greater confidence. It also allows an organizational infrastructure to grow seamlessly with the business itself, with companies able to quickly provision new resources as needed, deploy resources closer to their users, and scale autonomously. This ensures that IT infrastructure can adapt to changing business needs without huge upfront investments.
Azure’s global network of data centers and edge locations provides reduced latency by hosting applications closer to users (in the same vein as a Content Delivery Network does between servers).
Azure also provides automatic load balancing and high availability, combining to provide a robust, reliable environment that can enhance applications’ reliability and user experience.
Azure provides highly secure cloud services with seamless flexibility to increase productivity and reassurance. Its built-in security features, regular patch management, advanced threat detection and monitoring, compliance offerings, and multilayer security make it a trusted cloud solution trusted by businesses and institutions worldwide. As such, organizations can achieve a greater security posture by adopting Azure than if they used on-premises solutions alone.
Azure offers a suite of comprehensive management tools that allow organizations to monitor and manage both cloud and on-premises workload resources from a single, user-friendly interface. From this, automated management processes can be easily implemented, and IT operations can be streamlined to reduce the administrative burden on IT and systems experts. These capabilities allow IT teams to focus on more strategic, top-level tasks rather than routine maintenance responsibilities.
Given the complexities and intricacies involved with an Azure cloud migration project, many organizations opt to work with experienced and proven migration partners.
These partners can offer expertise in a wealth of Azure best practices, technologies and processes, having likely worked on migrating various complex on-premises workloads and or systems to an enterprise-grade Azure cloud solution. They will invariably be able to help companies plan, execute and manage the migration at all stages while ensuring the new Azure environment is optimized post-migration.
Managing an in-house cloud migration is entirely possible, but a qualified Azure migration specialist can invariably help organizations mitigate challenges more effectively and proactively, allowing them to see the benefits of Azure more quickly.
Migrating to Azure represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure, conserve costs, optimize resources, and innovate with greater flexibility. It’s no secret that such a move presents challenges and a cloud infrastructure will likely feel different than an on-premises architecture at first, but the potential benefits make it a compelling and lucrative option worth considering.