Best time to plan to migrate your on-premise datacenter to Azure

Everybody’s at home and tries to find an interesting topic and goal to spend the time useful. Or feels exhausted? Therefore you need to find a exciting activity or area where you can do some relaxing in the world of technology. Today I would like to suggest a great topic which is both exciting and useful. 2in1! It’s cool, isn’t it?

After the first quarter of 2020 you could read in financial reports: the On-Premise related revenues is higher than cloud related ones. Why? Maybe, during the current situation most of companies decreased their cloud related activities. Nevertheless this is not the best strategy in long term. I would not like to make financial analysis now, merely draw your attention, this is a great chance to plan and test “How you can on-premise datacenter to Azure”. And here there is another big “why?”.

Now the time pressure is lower, the workload is far from the usual. Additionally you may feel you don’t have huge motivation for your everyday activities. No problem, let’s start to do some exciting, something new, or something which is waiting for you… 🙂 The migration planning and playing with migration is one of the best activities for this purpose.

Azure has a prominent part that supports the migration of external resources (such as on-site) to Azure. This is the Azure Migrate. With this you have chance to migrate your on-premise services to Azure on a partial managed way.

You can migrate tons of resources like:

  • Windows and Linux servers from Hyper-V
  • Windows and Linux serves from VMWare
  • Windows and Linux Physical servers
  • Databases
    • MS SQL
    • MySQL
    • MariaDB
    • Non-SQL
  • Web Applications
  • VDIs

To start, I suggest to start the read the documentation above. Nevertheless, if you just would like to jump into the middle of this topic, let’s start on Portal. In Azure Portal, when you open Azure Migrate service page, you can realize this is a well structured and understandable process. Please don’t forget the migration is never an easy (next-next-finish) process.

I wouldn’t like to create a step-by-step action plan for each and every resource type migration because that is impossible. Sorry for this bad news. Nevertheless I would like to share some useful links to migration. These links could help you to do your best to discover the resources which could be migrated then you can plan the migration (in time and steps).

Maybe you know, the “Lift and Shift” migration strategy is not the best solution for long term. Additionally there will be several services which cannot be migrated without re-development, rebuilding, restructuring. Here you should think about microservices. Then you should choose the right architecture pattern. You should “choose” one of from XaaS (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc.). As you can see this is very-very complex topic. However this is a great chance to improve your knowledge and spend your time usefully.

Finally, here are the links for you:

… and millions like these on the internet. 🙂

I hope this article helps you to feel better in this period. And it supports your professional improvement.

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