Azure Migration Step-by-Step Checklist and Best Practices

Interested in migrating to Azure? Start with the Azure migration guide in the Cloud Adoption Framework. The guide walks you through a set of tools and basic approaches for migrating virtual machines to the cloud.

These guides and checklists outline the common areas of complexity that can require the scope of your migration to expand beyond the Azure migration steps. You will learn migration best practices beyond basic cloud-native tools by following the Azure migration assessment step-by-step process. 

Whether this is your first or second Azure migration - The Azure Cloud Experts are here to help.

You'll find the best Azure migration checklist in this article.

Azure Migration Step by Step:

Azure Migration Checklist Phase 1: Planning

The first step in the Azure migration checklist is to set your migration goals and business objectives. Tracking your progress and refining your strategy, as you move deeper into your Cloud environment, will be easier with the right goals.

The Assess phase includes three steps:

1. Discover

Azure migration assessment tools are used in the Discover step to create profile information and performance metrics about your applications. Building your Cloud migration plan will be easier with this information.

2. Map on-premises applications

Based on the information found during your Discovery, you'll map out the dependencies between your servers using Azure Cloud's migration assessment tools. By doing so, you will be able to identify all the necessary application components in your Cloud migration plan and reduce any risks involved.

3. Evaluate

Next, you'll need to decide how to move your applications to the Cloud. You can determine the cost and compatibility of your applications by using Azure migration assessment tools.a

Azure Migration Checklist Phase 2: Migrate

Depending on your business use case, you can migrate your workloads to Azure using four different strategies.

You could decompose business-critical apps into microservices and rehost or "lift and shift" less-strategic apps with no code changes.

Below are the four most common Azure migration strategies:

• Rehost – Great for quickly moving applications from your data center to the Cloud.
• Refactor – Best suited for situations where you need to use an existing code base with development skills and where code portability is a concern.
• Re-architect – A good choice when your application needs a major revision to incorporate new capabilities or to work more effectively on a Cloud platform.
• Rebuild – Use this strategy when you want rapid development and the existing application is limited in terms of functionality and lifespan.

Azure Migration Checklist Phase 3: Optimize

Ensure everything works as planned once you've successfully moved your applications to Azure Cloud. During the Optimize phase, all of this takes place.

This phase involves governing, securing, and monitoring your Azure Cloud applications. There's a lot to do, but Azure has a good collection of security and management resources to simplify things.

To optimize your workloads on Azure Cloud, you'll need the following tools:

Azure Security Center

Using the Security Center, you can monitor and control the security of all your Cloud applications. Your chances of getting breached will be dramatically reduced because you'll be able to respond to threats quickly.

Azure Cloud monitoring tools

Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights are Azure's cloud monitoring tools. These tools allow you to collect data from multiple sources and gain rich insights into the health of your Cloud infrastructure.

Azure Backup

By backing up your apps in Azure, you can avoid costly business disruptions, meet compliance goals, and protect your data from ransomware as well as human error. You only pay for what you use, plus you can restore data for free.

Reasons Organizations Migrate to the Cloud:

There are a variety of reasons why businesses are moving to the cloud. 

• In cloud computing, the cloud provider provides all the hardware (servers, storage devices, firewalls, switches, routers) that you would normally need to purchase and manage. You can eliminate these regular capital costs by moving to the cloud.

• The cloud requires less infrastructure to maintain, so you require fewer staff and resources to maintain it. In the long run, moving to the cloud will reduce your operating costs.
• There is an opportunity cost associated with large capital expenditures. An on-premises server implementation costs $50,000, which you cannot spend on other initiatives. Cloud computing replaces large capital expenditures with recurring monthly fees.

• Scalability: Moving to the cloud makes scaling up and down much easier. Without worrying about long-term changes, you only pay for what you need now. If your needs change, you don't have to plan capacity for the next five years
• Reduced downtime and data loss: Moving data to the cloud reduces downtime and data loss. 99%+ uptime is guaranteed by most cloud providers. A cloud provider that offers redundancy and high-speed connections makes it easier to maintain availability and reliability.

How Do I Migrate an Application to Azure?

1. Download and install the Data Migration Assistant.
2. Perform a SQL Server migration assessment of your data.
3. Use the Azure Database Migration Service to easily migrate your data, schema, and objects from on-premises to the cloud at scale.

FAQ:

• What are the steps in the Azure migration journey?

1. Discover and assess your apps, databases and infrastructure
2. Get insights into your dependencies using automated cloud migration tools
3. Make a business case for migration and modernisation
4. Build a holistic plan

• What are the 3 main phases of a cloud migration?
  

1. The cloud optimization phase is a process to analyze the allocation of cloud resources and right-size your environment to optimize costs
2. Application modernization enables organizations to make smart, data-driven decisions and respond rapidly to market changes by utilizing modern technologies and processes
3. Measuring business impact with KPIs is also a vital element to the digital business flourishing

• How do I migrate from premises to Azure?
  

1. Migrate on-premises physical servers
2. Migrate VMs virtualized by platforms such as Xen, and KVM
3. Migrate Hyper-V or VMware VMs, if for some reason you're unable to use the standard migration process for Hyper-V, or VMware migration
4. Migrate VMs running in private clouds
5. Migrate VMs running in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform

Infiflex has been providing Google Workspace service for the past two years. It has been ranked as the best Google Workspace Partner in India.