It is fair to say that the public cloud adoption curve is in its home stretch. Thanks to Azure virtual desktop technologies, the late adoption curve has been shrinking at light speed. Microsoft has recently announced that two years’ worth of digital transformation has happened in two months since March 2020. By now, most companies have some workloads moved to the cloud, so the question of IF you are moving to the cloud is no longer relevant.
The new cloud adoption question is framed as which, when, and how are you moving workloads to the cloud? Among those, I am particularly interested in the how.
To explore this transformation further, we interviewed some of our in-house Azure consultants here at Connection. Let us jump right into those questions and their answers. Hopefully, it can help you gain some useful insights to your own journey.
The Azure Readiness Interview
Sree: What is the most important reason to consider migrating your business’s workloads to Azure?
Azure Consultant: Especially in today’s new normal, companies are trying to do more with less. To that end, IT organizations have become leaner and are required to deliver solutions and do more to enable their core businesses than ever before. One of the ways they can do this is to leverage the cloud to remove the requirements on their staff to maintain a data center, server hardware, or legacy system. Much like many individuals have changed their banking habits from pen and paper ledgers to online banking for ease of use and integration with other online systems—IT leaders must evolve their systems in the same way.
Related: Moving to the Cloud? 6 Reasons Small Businesses are Choosing Microsoft Azure
Sree: What are the common mistakes that people make as they prepare for a migration to Azure?
Azure Consultant: The most common mistake we see is companies either jumping in without understanding the costs associated with the cloud or without a business driver to help push their project through from the top. Understanding the “apples to apples” comparison between on-premises deployments and the cloud is important to get the full picture of both. Connection’s Azure Readiness Assessment can help with that. Additionally, there should be a business driver to support this type of migration/transformation. Without this driver, the project often loses funding or backing.
Sree: What are the things to consider as you prepare for Azure Migration?
Azure Consultant: When an IT team builds an application on-premises, it is often built with as many resources (processor/memory) as the server budget will allow. This goes in direct conflict with the way you consume the cloud. When migrating workloads to Azure, you want to make sure you “right-size” the server to keep costs to a minimum.
Additionally, follow the 4 R’s of migration (Rehost, Refactor, Rebuild, Retire). Refactoring traditional IaaS solutions to Azure Native (PaaS) implementations is key to taking full advantage of the cloud.
Sree: How can Connection help with Azure Migration?
Azure Consultant: Connection’s Azure Readiness Assessment answers most of the initial questions organizations have when making the transition to the cloud. Cost analysis (including right-sizing), 4 R determination, and compatibility determination are all deliverables of our assessment. These high-level answers are critical to ensuring that your migration project is backed by concrete data points.
To learn more about our Azure Readiness Service, reach out to your Account Manager. Azure Readiness is one of the components of our Azure Landscape Optimization (AZLO) Service, and you can check out our Azure practice to learn more.
Sreeraj Vasukuttan
Sreeraj Vasukuttan is a Technical Marketing Manager at Connection with a passion for technology and marketing. He enjoys writing about cloud, security, and end-user compute. In his free time, he loves watching films, cooking, and traveling with his family.
