Azure - Migrating Business to Cloud

Moving apps and services to the Cloud is a significant long-term trend, but that doesn’t mean that cloud migration is right for everyone. While cloud environments are generally scalable, reliable, and highly available, those won’t be the only considerations driving your decision. While making this decision your thoughts should be totally unbiased, so that you can make right choice. 

Benefits of a cloud migration

Ø  Focused on Business needs

o    In complex environments, the costs of maintaining an individual application, are difficult to quantify. Just tracking the uses of the resources, is hard when applications are shared across platforms and a common infrastructure. In Azure, every application resource is quantifiable, billable and can be reported on. Monthly usage reports can be generated that show how each resource is used. This focuses on how much an application costs the people that use it. It means IT can become a cost-generator, rather than a just a cost center.

Ø  Focused on application needs

o    Clients require fast application implementation and deployment, and thus want to focus more on development while reducing infrastructure overhead. Your clients want to expand their business geographically, but you suspect that setting up a multi-region infrastructure – with all the associated maintenance, time, human, and error control effort – is going to be a challenge. With the amount of services Azure has to offer, applications can take advantage of pre-existing services to both reduce the amount of resources an application consumes, and enable developer’s/application architects to focus solely on the application’s business purpose.

Ø  Scalability

o    Your application is experiencing increased traffic and you’re finding it difficult to scale resources on the fly to meet the increasing demand or you are finding that keeping up with growing storage needs is becoming a problem. I n Azure, all resources are flexible, meaning applications can scale up and down as needed. Everything is paid for on a consumption basis, so you also only pay for what you use – so the application that only requires scale once a month, only incurs charges once a month. Storage too can be provisioned for many terabytes, but is only paid for as those terabytes get used. Scale is also automated – applications scale on demand, according to which resources are needed.

Ø  Availability -  In Azure, the PaaS and IaaS services have multiple layers of redundancy designed to ensure 99.95% uptime, and these sit outside of the application layer.

Ø  BC (Business Continuity) \ DR (Disaster Recovery) - Every business should have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan integrated with daily operations. Setting up a disaster recovery system for an entire data center can sometimes nearly double the cost, and also require complex disaster recovery plans. Cloud DR systems can be implemented much more quickly and simply while allowing far better control over resources.  Azure Site Recovery Services enables you to move business continuity and disaster recovery to the cloud. Azure Recovery Services has the capability to coordinate failover and replication of VMs and physical machines. Small and mid-sized enterprises can all benefit from Azure Recovery services to deploy a solid disaster recovery plan in the cloud.

What do you need?

Ø  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives you control starting at the guest operating system level and through the runtime executables, the data, any management middleware and finally the application.

Ø  Platform as a Service (PaaS) moves more responsibility off of your shoulders. Here, you only need to manage the applications and the data. Everything else is somebody else’s problem.

Ø  Software as a Service (SaaS) takes all the responsibility away. You use the applications and the data without managing any of it.

Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud?

Ø  Public cloud - Organizations that need to quickly ramp performance and has fluctuating capacity and a limited resource pool for the investment. Typically suited for basic SaaS applications like E-Mail, and in an environment where data and applications are not very critical or susceptible to attack and theft.

Ø  Private cloud - Best suited for organizations where applications and data are mission critical and bound by restrictions.

Ø  Hybrid cloud - Most modern organizations are unable to make a decision between taking a completely public or private cloud approach. Transferring storage and computation to the public cloud definitely has its cost advantages, but some mission critical data and applications must remain on premises. A hybrid cloud model makes perfect sense in such a scenario.

o    Let’s imagine that your web application is quickly gaining popularity and users. In order to keep up with the growing demand, you need the underlying resource to scale up dynamically. During peak usage, you should be able to deploy maximum resources serving requests, and when demand drops you should ideally be able to simply drop unneeded resources to save costs. Within a public cloud this is very much possible. But let’s say that, the data your app gathers are highly confidential and just can’t be stored off-premise. This is where a hybrid solution can help by allowing you to choose which components you want to live in the public cloud, and which in your datacenter.

Migration steps to Azure

There’s an old saying that goes, “Easy-to-Use is easy to say!”. The same holds true for migrating workloads and applications to Microsoft Azure. Microsoft recommends four step migration process:

Ø  Discover – Catalog your software and workloads

o    Every application has its integration points, like payment gateways, servers, web services, external storage, and third party vendors. It’s very important to analyze the impact your cloud migration will have on those dependencies. Sometimes you will experience unexpected connectivity or authentication challenges that you’ll be well served identifying and solving up front. The most critical and tedious task is to identify all those integration points. There are some asset discovery tools that can help you discover assets.

Ø  Assess – Categorize applications and workloads

o    Some traditional applications are so complicated and tightly coupled that customers might not be willing to rework it. However, the foremost requirement for any successful migration is that the app should follow a distributed architecture and should be scalable by design. There are some tools on the market that can help you assess your applications’ cloud-readiness.

Ø  Target – Identify the destination for each of your workloads.

Ø  Migrate – Make the actual move.