Cloud Migration and Modernization with Azure

Global businesses were predicted to spend $3.5 trillion on IT in 2017, out of which $1.3 trillion was directed towards enterprise software and IT services. Every year, a significant amount of total spends by any business is dedicated to maintaining the existing enterprise applications, which run the business. In such scenarios, moving your legacy applications onto the modern cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Azure holds a greater promise for companies to reduce their IT costs and leverage the savings for a competitive advantage.

Modernizing makes sense, when done right and defines the know-how of avoiding the pitfalls. It is of utmost importance that you consider the needs and requirements of your business apps to optimize the cost-effectiveness of your cloud migration strategy. Azure – the cloud services from Microsoft helps get this done by bringing together everything your business needs in regards to products, services, and third-party applications.

1. Security – Microsoft Azure helps cloud providers tighten their security procedures by building better security protocols into their service offerings to cover attacks and other leaks.
2. Costs – The Azure enables you to explore and exploit opportunities far more rapidly and at a much lower entry cost. The outsourced cloud also allows switching of the budget model from capex to opex.
3. Compliance – Cloud providers, like Azure, are recognizing the importance of customers achieving compliance with regulatory bodies by introducing new compliance updates and guidelines.
4. Data – Enterprises always store, retrieve and analyze the massive amount of data and with the emergence of IoT and big data the task is more challenging than ever. Microsoft Azure offers an extended arm for storing and retrieving the large enterprise data.
5. Skills – The adoption of the cloud may mean new technology, but it does not necessarily need more people as you can do more with fewer resources.

Although there is no single or one-size-fits-all strategy to migrate the legacy applications to the cloud, the right migration strategy will depend on the organization’s needs and priorities. Also, on the kind of apps they want to migrate.

Here are the different maturity levels to modernize legacy applications with Microsoft Azure:

• Cloud Infrastructure-based Applications – It migrates or rehosts your existing on-premises applications to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. The apps will have almost the same composition as before, but they can now be able to deploy to VMs in the cloud. This form of migration is typically known as “Lift & Shift.”
• Cloud Optimized Applications – In this level, you can gain additional benefits even without altering or the significantly rearchitecting the code by running your app with modern cloud technologies like containers or through other cloud-managed services. Also, you can deploy the containers on PaaS or IaaS to databases, monitoring, cache as a service, and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) pipelines.
• Cloud-Native Applications – The third maturity level is the ultimate cloud goal, but it is optional for many apps. It is driven by the business needs and targets modernizing approach for mission-critical applications. In this level, you can use PaaS services to move the apps to PaaS computing platforms. New code often required to be written, especially while moving to cloud-native applications or microservice-based models. This approach helps to gain the benefits, which are hard to achieve in a consistent or on-premise application environment.

From the DevOps, IoT to business analytics your business will reach another level with Microsoft Azure, a scalable and cost-effective solution working with your existing investments. The company will have a greater collaboration between operations & development engineers throughout the services lifecycle, from design to production support by modernizing legacy applications with Azure.