Azure Database Migration Services - Strategy, Consulting & Benefits
What do you think is the best Azure database migration strategy to achieve seamless cloud transitions? Well, try it! Understanding Azure cloud database migration services can be the best answer to cloud transitions.
Cloud migrations are trending in today’s world, and businesses are expressing more interest in shifting their workloads to the cloud for a smarter workspace.
Apart from migrating databases to Azure cloud services, businesses are most concerned about the strategies and benefits of Azure database migration to know what they chose is right for them. Of course, they are not wrong! Determining the right cloud strategy, operating model, roadmap, and ecosystem partners accelerates cloud migration strategies with security management.
We shall take a sneak peek through this article to learn about the Azure database migration process, strategies, consulting, and benefits to unleash the competitive edge of your business.
Let’s go!
Why is Azure Database Migration Service the best choice for businesses?
Azure migration services are framed with strong motivation-driven strategies and business outcomes that highlight the migration and innovation motivations and their corresponding strategies.
The outcomes of Azure data migration services successfully create business outcomes that take you towards:
- Sustainable goals
- Increased cost-savings
- Reduced technical & vendor complexity
- Internal operations optimization
- New technical capabilities
- Scalable market & geographical demands
- Improve customer engagement and experience
- Transform products & services
Perks of Microsoft Azure Cloud migration
Cloud migrations often have benefits that pose challenges as well. Microsoft Azure migration comes with perks like reduced IT costs, and increased business performance. Some of the most benefiting Azure cloud migration services include:
Optimized Costs: Significant savings are made with resources, maintenance, and real estate costs, and the ability to optimize workloads to operate with less costs.
Flexibility & Scalability: Azure cloud migration services charge for the services the organizations utilize, which means the organizations need not pay for the resources that they did not use and maintain IT assets that they may use occasionally.
During spiking demands, organizations would require powerful computing resources, organizations can alter their resources instantly on demand.
To increase the value of existing IT investments, most of them choose hybrid cloud model, where the workloads are migrated from on-premises to cloud infrastructure.
Azure migration improves scalability maintaining a global presence with enhanced performance.
Security: Azure cloud services have built-in security features where specialized cloud tools help to ensure the protection of business resources. Security patching is automatically performed in most cases.
Compliance:Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure meet compliance needs with specialized offers, especially in highly regulated fields like finance, healthcare, and government.
Migration to Azure cloud allows organizations to stay in compliance with the cloud requirements ensuring complete protection of the organization’s cloud computing services.
Disaster Recovery: Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure managed cloud services tend to enhance business continuity with built-in and one-click backup recovery with the ability to store backups in different geographic regions
Stored files can be restored anytime with disaster recovery options, and organizations need not worry about any data loss due to several calamities.
Monitoring & Management: Azure migrations are feasible to manage, and organizations can manage, monitor their on-premises datacenter and cloud resources from a single screen if the cloud provider offers a central management tool.
Streamline Infrastructure management: It encourages flexibility and a pay-as-you-go subscription model for businesses without collecting extra for the services that they did not utilize.
Key Considerations to Assess Azure Cloud Migration Readiness
Microsoft Azure cloud migration services recommend a reliable process where Access stands primary for migrating applications and workloads to Azure. Key considerations include:
1.Recognize Cloud Migration Objectives:
- Preventing the cost of data center maintenance
- Achieving incredible scalability
- Enhanced resiliency with the best failover capabilities
- Remote collaboration at ease
2. Determining the Budget
Key parameters to consider while calculating the TCO:
- Average unit size of the resource
- Estimation of the workload growth
- Management and infrastructure requirements
- Average usage per month
- Security requirements
3. Team’s Skill Gap Assessment
- Know about the team skill set level for seamless transitions.
- Know if the team has experience with cloud migration
- Check if the team has equipped with the required migration tools & technologies.
4. Assessing Operational Readiness
- Operational models with deployment and alerts
- Ownership operations with cloud applications and dependent systems
- Documentation of operational workload
- Benchmarking the best operational practices
- Best disaster recovery plan
5. Identify Security Needs
- Security & compliance requirements
- Identity & access management
- Disaster recovery managements
- Firewall & end-point security
Step-by-Step Azure Database Migration Process
The four-step Azure cloud database migration process for migrating applications from on-premises infrastructure to Azure cloud is as follows:
- Assess
- Migrate
- Optimize
- Secure & Manage
Step-1: Assess
- Networking: Peep into the details of creating a virtual network to sustain the maintenance of the same performance, and stability on the on-premises data center. Have a look at the subnets you would require and manage DNS through Azure DNS services.
- Storage: Monitor the Azure storage services to choose a solution according to the allowed number of operations per second. Remember that the nature of data must be stored in slow, and inexpensive costs.
- Scalability: Get to know about Azure Auto-scale and utilize it to scale your applications dynamically. Do not forget that it requires careful cost modeling.
Azure database migration tools are utilized to assess applications for cloud migrations and automated recommendations regarding CPU, storage requirements, current network architecture, disk size, capacity, and performance with high availability recommendations for continuous maintenance. Azure Disaster Recovery is an add-on benefit to recover your data with no loss during the cloud migration process.
Step-2: Migrate
Key factors to consider while choosing to migrate to Azure cloud services:
- If you want to choose to run operations with serverless functions in containers or traditional VMs?
- If you want to use hybrid cloud solutions?
- If you’re compatible with certain workloads using Office 365, but not suitable with Azure?
- If you want to migrate machines with higher capacity?
- If you have special hardware requirements that do not support specific VMs?
It’s recommended to start with the smaller point of contact that provides value to businesses with feasible migration.
Step-3: Optimization
- After deploying Azure migration services, it’s time to frequently monitor your application performance. Try to track your expenses and look to optimize with Azure cloud solutions.
- Frequent monitoring allows you to look for new performance areas to reach migration goals with an on-premises model, and plan to reinvest in other business capabilities by optimizing costs.
Step-4: Secure & Manage
- Microsoft Azure migration services are power packed with robust security and compliance maintenance to reap maximum business benefits.
- Secure tools and recommendations are followed for any cloud migration on Azure cloud platform. It includes thorough checking on the functionality of security measures and responding to incidents.
- Azure migration services implement outclass data protection services with safety measures including backup & disaster recovery, and end-to-end encryption, for your business compliance.
Overview of Azure Database Migration Strategy
Azure database migration key alternative strategies involve the choice of cloud services and the steps to implement them in the right way with accurate resources that fit your business needs. The strategies include:
Rehost: Azure cloud migration helps you migrate with no modifications that are ideal for legacy migrations, and team involved with limited skill set.
Benefits
- Immediate cloud ROI
- Reduced app operational cost
- Free data center space
- Feasible & quicker migration process with no risk of application breaking at any stage.
Repackage: Application migration to Azure cloud services with minimal code changes. They are ideal for applications with business-critical functionalities.
Benefits
- Increased cloud efficiency
- Improved portability of code
- Feasible & quick for scalable infrastructure
Rearchitect: Rearranging the codebase of applications with cloud-native architecture that’s ideal for applications with agility, scalability, and flexibility.
Benefits
- Cost reduction in ownership
- Agile cloud solutions
- Achievement of application resilience
- Scalability
Rebuild: Rebuilding functionalities from scratch discarding the older applications utilizing PaaS. They are ideal for applications with low complexity, and limited dependencies
Benefits
- Innovation with cloud services like AI (Artificial Intelligence), IoT (Internet of Things), Blockchain, etc.
- Reduced cost of operations
- Quick updates & feature enhancements
- Cost-effective and helps in software license complexities
- No dependency on existing infrastructure
Cost of Azure Migration Services
It’s versatile to recognize the challenges and utilize great opportunities with Azure Cloud migration services. Cost optimization in Azure cloud services support the below factors:
- The scope of migration per server
- App deployment timelines and choices
- Estimation of testing effort
- Average application lifespan and application readiness
- Volume of data transfer
- The extent of migration automation with the license cost.
Reasons to Kick-start Azure Database Migration Journey with HexaCorp
HexaCorp’s Azure Cloud Management Services support migration with one-stop solutions to scale your infrastructure with viability
With streamlined processes, we maintain efficient business administration utilizing our Microsoft Azure cloud migration solutions.
We assure dynamic support, security & compliance supervision for entire Azure services with Azure Managed Platform.
Proactive Monitoring & Incident Response: Constantly monitoring & resolving potential issues via Proactive Monitoring prior to business challenges.
Backups, Archive & Disaster Recovery: Have your data backup at an assigned setting with disaster recovery strategy deploying Azure cloud services. Prevent Costly business interruption with integrated on-premises data backup solutions.
Infrastructure as code: Proactively detect rigid & problematic configurations during manual infrastructure changes.
Managed Firewall, VPN & Endpoint Support: Secure digital assets with Azure-managed Firewall solutions. Get a feasible security system setup to scale automatically within your network.
Conclusion
On-Premises to Azure Cloud Migrations are essential for businesses and organizations to enhance and modernize with several advantages that makes them stay competitive in the marketplace. Microsoft Azure makes the process even more flexible and sophisticated with a wide range of tools allowing businesses to adapt to the cloud infrastructure. Choose the right fit for your business and you are unstoppable!
For more information related to Azure cloud migration with HexaCorp, please feel free to contact us via email or visit our website www.hexacorp.com to talk to our Azure experts.
Happy Learning!!
