So, your company plans to migrate to Azure and wonder if this is a complicated project or not? Well, it depends on how complicated you want it to be. With the right project manager, the right preparations, and the right engineers from the right cloud migration partners – this is not complicated or costly at all.
First step is to analyze the current situation and do it workload by workload. You need to learn the cloud migration prerequisites for every component. For each workload you need to evaluate if you’re keeping it ‘as is’, replacing it by another application or replacing it with a service (SaaS). Migrating applications to Azure cloud is just a matter of preparations.
Next step is to plan the new setup. This is where you make the decision to modernize or migrate ‘as is’. You’re most likely going to do a mix of this. For older applications, you should do a test migration in order to see if it works well or not in the cloud.
In traditional hosting, we often used Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) but it’s well worth to consider to instead use Azure Virtual Desktop (previously called Windows Virtual Desktop). The new Azure Virtual Desktop can easily replace legacy Win RDS in most scenarios.
In traditional hosting, you always wanted to have surplus capacity. The approach for the Microsoft Cloud (i.e. Azure) is that you should ‘right-size’ which eliminates the need to pay for capacity that just sits idle. Because it’s easy to increase capacity at an instant, you can do it as the need arise.
Moving to the cloud is also a great opportunity to reduce complexity and take out cost in databases. You can often consolidate and even buy database a service.
The actual migration will happen without any noticeable downtime. If there’s a need for downtime that affects uptime, then it can always be scheduled to a timeslot in the week where the impact is the lowest.
There are several migration tools to choose between, and a skilled partner with an experienced project manager will use the tools that works best. And cloud managed services companies are plenty out there so you’ll surely find the right one!
Today, migrating to the cloud are projects with no drama at all as you can mitigate the risks of cloud migration. And don’t forget that migrating applications to Azure cloud is a great opportunity to modernize your total setup!