On-prem To Cloud: Step-by-step Azure Migration Checklist For 2024

Summary

Table of Contents

Introduction

Planning a move to the cloud isn’t easy. It requires careful consideration of scalability, security, and cost efficiency. To simplify your transition, we’ve crafted the ultimate Azure Migration Checklist for 2024.

Azure isn’t just about making a move to the cloud; it transforms how you operate:

• Scalability: Easily adjust to varying demands without over-provisioning or resource shortages for better Azure Resource Management.
• Global Reach: Access 215 Azure regions worldwide for high availability and low latency.
• Security: Use Microsoft’s advanced security measures to protect your data and applications.
• Simplicity: Streamline complex infrastructure management with intuitive tools and automation.

Above all this, Imagine slashing your expenses by up to 5X times while gaining unparalleled growth and operational efficiency. Get your hands on our detailed Azure migration checklist and start your journey today! But before that, let’s look at why businesses want to move to the cloud in the first place.

5 Major Reasons Businesses Are Making Move To The Cloud

• Reduce Upfront Costs: There is no need to buy and manage hardware; the cloud provides everything.
• Lower Operating Expenses: Decrease operating expenses by minimizing infrastructure maintenance, leading to reduced staffing and resource requirements.
• Replace Capital Expenditures: Swap considerable upfront costs for manageable monthly fees.
• Easy Scaling: Easily scale resources to match fluctuating demand, ensuring efficient cost management.
• Enhanced Uptime: Cloud providers offer 99%+ uptime and features that reduce downtime and data loss.

Azure Migration Checklist: The Ultimate Guide To Get Started

Before starting your migration, review this Azure migration checklist. It details the essential steps for preparing and executing your move to the Azure cloud effectively.

1. Pre Migration Assessment

This Azure migration checklist for pre-migration assessment will help you plan and execute your migration, ensuring a smooth transition to Azure while maximizing benefits and minimizing risks.

Define Your Migration Objectives

This step is the foundation of your entire Azure migration strategy. Clarity on your objectives enables you to select the appropriate plan and evaluate your achievements effectively. When you define your goals, keep these critical questions in mind.

• What are your main goals when moving to Azure?
• Are you trying to save money, improve backup and recovery, and improve security, or make your applications run better?

Identify where to cut costs with Azure’s pay-as-you-go model and retiring old systems. Define how Azure’s scalability will handle your current and future workloads and set metrics to measure its effectiveness. Understanding these goals helps you focus on what’s most important for your business during the move. Also, ensure all stakeholders, including IT, finance, and business units, understand and agree on the objectives.

Conduct Application and Workload Analysis

This step involves thoroughly examining your existing applications and workloads. It helps determine their migration suitability and compatibility. Use Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to assess organizational readiness.

What to Analyze?

• Application Functionality: Understand what each application does and its dependencies on other systems to assess compatibility with Azure services.
• Technical Stack: Identify the programming languages, frameworks, and databases each application uses.
• Resource Utilization: Analyze your applications’ CPU, memory, storage, and network usage patterns to estimate future resource needs based on current utilization and projected growth.
• Security Requirements: Assess the security posture of your applications and data to identify sensitive data and determine how to handle it in Azure.

Examine Your Data

Data is critical for any business. Understanding data volume, sensitivity, and access needs is essential for planning a secure and efficient migration.

What to consider?

• Data Volume: Estimate the total amount of data you wish to migrate, including structured( databases and unstructured data(documents, images)
• Data Sensitivity: Identify any data that meets regulatory compliance requirements or has high levels of confidentiality (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
• Data Access Needs: Define who needs access to migrated data and how they will access it in the cloud.

Analyze Your Network Needs

Understanding your network requirements ensures smooth communication between your on-premises environment and Azure after migration.

What to Analyze?

• Bandwidth Requirements: Assess the bandwidth required for data transfer between on-premise and Azure Resources.
• Network Security: Analyze your existing network security policies and determine how to adapt them for Azure.
• Latency Requirements: Analyze your network security policies and determine how to adapt them for Azure.

Perform Cost Assessment

Cloud migration can be cost-effective, but it is essential to assess the potential costs. This step helps you budget for the migration and identify potential savings. Remember that Azure offers significant cost savings compared to AWS, particularly for Windows and SQL servers, where Azure costs are 5x lower.

What to Analyze?

• Azure Pricing: Understand Azure pricing models for the resources you plan to use, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage.
• Migration Costs: Consider costs associated with tools migration services and potential downtime.
• Long-Term Cost-Savings: Factor in potential savings from reduced hardware maintenance, software licensing costs, and improved resource utilization. Additionally, conduct a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison between on-premises solutions and Azure.

2. Planning and Prepare

The Pre-migration assessment provided a roadmap; now it’s time to translate that knowledge into a solid plan for your Azure migration. Here’s how!

Choose the Correct Migration Strategy

Selecting the right migration approach depends on your application’s complexity, desired outcome, and resource constraints. Select the most suitable approach for each workload mentioned in the Azure migration checklist below. Here are the standard options:

1. Rehost (Lift and Shift): Move existing applications “as-is” to Azure virtual machines for a quick start.
2. Rearchitect (optimize your code): Similar to lift-and-shift, but with minor cloud environment optimizations. It might involve using managed services or optimizing storage configurations.
3. Refactoring (repackage): Modernize applications during migration to improve performance and scalability and leverage cloud-native features. It requires more development but offers long-term advantages.
4. Rebuilding (build cloud-native): Create new cloud-native applications by utilizing various Azure services.

Migrating to Azure presents an opportunity to enhance your applications, improving their speed and effectiveness. You can leverage Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for container management, Azure Functions, and Azure Logic Apps to develop flexible, event-triggered applications without managing infrastructure. Additionally, explore upgrading or reimagining older applications to leverage Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions and Azure microservices for enhanced capabilities.

Develop a Migration Plan

A detailed migration plan outlines your migration strategy’s steps, timelines, resources, and dependencies involved in your migration journey.

What to Include:

• Migration Scope: Define which applications and workloads will be migrated in which phases.
• Migration Timeline: Set realistic timelines for each stage, considering dependencies and testing needs.
• Resource Allocation: Determine the technical tools and personnel required for the migration process.
• Rollback Strategy: Develop a plan to revert the on-premise environment if necessary.

Configure Your Azure Setup

This step involves setting up your Azure Environment to accommodate your migrated resources.

Key Considerations

• Virtual Network: Create a virtual network in Azure to define the private IP address space for your migrated resources.
• Storage Accounts: Configure storage accounts in Azure to store your migrated data, ensuring appropriate access and security controls.
• Identity and Access Management: Use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to oversee user identities, streamline access permissions, and effectively manage cloud resource security.
• Security Services: Utilize Azure Security Center and other Azure security tools & services to protect your cloud environments from threats.

Implement Governance and Compliance

Establish governance policies and procedures to manage your Azure resources effectively and comply with relevant regulations. Check these points off your Azure cloud migration checklist!

Key Actions

• Resource Tagging: Implement consistent tagging practices for your resources to facilitate organization and cost allocation.
• Cost Management: Utilize Azure Cost Management tools to oversee and optimize your cloud expenditure effectively.
• Compliance Requirements: Where applicable, identify and enforce the necessary measures to meet industry regulations (e.g., HIPAA, PCI DSS) within your Azure setup.

Operational Readiness

• Operational Framework: Develop an operational framework for monitoring, incident management, and change in the new environment.
• Runbooks and SOPs: Prepare runbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for managing Azure resources.

Educate Your Team

A well-informed team is crucial for a successful migration. Educating your IT staff on Azure will empower them to manage the cloud environment effectively.

Training Options

• Microsoft Azure Documentation: Utilize Microsoft’s comprehensive documentation for in-depth learning about Azure services and functionalities.
• Microsoft Azure Training: Consider enrolling your team in official Microsoft Azure training courses or online tutorials.
• Internal Knowledge Sharing: Promote knowledge exchange within your team by encouraging experienced members to mentor others on Azure concepts.

3. Migration Execution

Now that you’ve planned and prepared your environment, it’s time to execute the actual migration of your workloads to Azure.

Backup and Validate data

Data security is vital. It’s essential to back up your data before migration to provide a recovery option in case of unforeseen issues.

What to Do:

• Utilize appropriate backup tools and services to create secure backups of your on-premises data.
• Validate your backups by performing test restores to ensure data integrity.

Conduct Pre-Migration Testing

Testing your applications in a simulated Azure environment helps identify potential issues and ensures a smooth migration.

Testing Strategies:

• Proof-of-Concept (POC): Migrate a small sample of your environment to Azure and test functionality thoroughly.
• Staging Environment: Create a staging environment in Azure that closely mirrors your production environment. This will allow you to test applications and integrations extensively before migrating production data.

Migrate Your workloads

This step in the Azure Migration Checklist is the core of the migration process, where you move your applications and data to Azure.

Migration Tools:

• Utilize Azure Migrate, Database Migration Service, and other migration tools offered by Microsoft to automate tasks and streamline the process.
• Follow best practices for data migration, application configuration, and testing during migration.

Monitor and Address Issues

Closely monitor your migrated applications and resources after migration to identify performance issues or errors.

Proactive Monitoring:

• Use Azure monitoring tools to monitor resource usage, application performance, and security metrics effectively.
• Have a plan to address any issues promptly to minimize downtime or disruption.

Verify and Validate Post-Migration

• Verify Data Integrity: Confirm complete and accurate data migration through data checksums, validation tools, and test queries/reports against the migrated data.
• Validate Application Functionality: Thoroughly test migrated applications’ functionality and performance to ensure they operate and respond as expected in the Azure environment.
• Optimize Performance and Costs: Use Azure monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation (e.g., rightsizing virtual machines), and leverage auto-scaling for improved efficiency.
• Secure Your Azure Environment: Review and refine security policies access controls, and utilize Azure Security Center for ongoing threat detection and vulnerability management.

4. Optimization

Having successfully migrated your workloads to Azure, it’s time to unlock its full potential. This section explores optimization strategies for ongoing performance, security, and innovation.

Enhance and Fine-tune (squeeze the most out of Azure)

• Performance Optimization: Utilize Azure monitoring tools to identify resource bottlenecks. Implement techniques like auto-scaling, caching, and load balancing to ensure optimal application performance in the cloud.
• Cost Management: Regularly monitor Azure resource consumption and expenditures. Utilize Azure Cost Management tools to pinpoint opportunities for cost reduction by leveraging reserved instances, adjusting resource sizes to match actual needs, and optimizing pricing tiers aligned with your usage trends.

Implement Disaster Recovery and Backup Plans

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Create a thorough disaster recovery in Azure through a (DR) strategy to maintain business continuity during outages.
• Regular Backups: Establish a backup schedule for your critical Azure resources and data. It ensures you have a recent copy readily available for recovery in case of accidental data loss or corruption.

Provide Ongoing Training and Support

• Continuous Learning: Encourage your IT team to remain up-to-date with the newest Azure services, features, and best practices—Leverage Microsoft’s comprehensive documentation, training programs, and certifications to advance their knowledge and skills continuously.
• Knowledge Sharing: Encourage collaborative knowledge sharing among your team members. Encourage seasoned members to mentor others on Azure principles and best practices, enhancing team expertise and competency.

Drive Continuous Improvement and Innovate

• Embrace New Services: Explore the vast Azure services beyond your initial migration needs. As this Azure Migration checklist highlights, utilize Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, or Azure IoT Hub to unlock new capabilities and enhance your applications.
• Innovation and Automation: Always look for ways to automate tasks in your Azure setup. Azure Automation can help streamline deployments, manage configurations, and handle IT operations more efficiently.
• Security Focus: Ensuring security is an ongoing task. Regularly reassess and refine your security strategies, access management, and threat detection systems to maintain a robust and secure Azure environment.

Tick off all the points from our Azure cloud migration checklist to ensure a smooth transition and adherence to best practices throughout the migration process.

Summary: Step-By-Step Migration to Azure

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the purpose of an Azure migration checklist?

An Azure cloud migration checklist ensures that all essential steps, from one planning step to optimization, are systematically followed, providing a smooth and efficient transition to Azure.

How does a staging environment help Azure migration?

A staging environment replicates your production setup for thorough pre-migration testing, identifying and resolving issues before the migration, ensuring a seamless transition.

Can I migrate all my data and applications to Azure?

Generally, you can migrate most of your data and applications to Azure. However, specific legacy applications may not be immediately compatible and might need adjustments or modernization before migration.