Azure Migration Services
You and your team need a cloud platform that can be relied on to support the work you do every day — have you considered migrating from your on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft Azure?
The cloud is everywhere. Especially over the past few years, cloud solutions have rapidly taken over both the private and professional worlds, offering end-users the freedom to access their data when, where, and how they want to — have you gotten on board yet?
You likely have a great reason to try out a cloud solution right now, but you just don’t know it yet.
It’s unavoidable — there comes a time when on-premises hardware becomes outdated, old or obsolete. When that happens, you have to ask yourself a question: should your organization continue to go through periodic hardware refreshes?
Innovative cloud services make it easy to leave on-premises hardware behind — solutions like Microsoft Azure.
Introducing Microsoft Azure
Azure is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform. You and your team can rely on this solution to help you cut costs by hosting off-site and benefit from a totally scalable configuration that fits your business needs.
Why Choose Microsoft Azure?
- Stop Worrying About Your Servers: Stay focused on the parts of your business that really need your attention. You don’t have to babysit your servers any longer – take the resources previously devoted to service maintenance and apply them where they can have the greatest effect.
- Harness The Power Of Managed Cloud Services: Being free of onsite servers is just the beginning of the benefits offered by Azure. The serverless computing solutions offered by Azure equip you with the capability to take advantage of programming models that are offered nowhere else, helping to simplify event-driven computing.
- Maintain Data Security: Microsoft Azure data is stored in data centers that offer an industry-leading combination of physical and logical safeguards, from high perimeter fencing and 24/7 surveillance to multi-factor biometric locks.
- Go Green: Whether your business has a mandate to be as green as possible or not, you can do so with Microsoft Azure. After achieving carbon neutrality in 2014, Microsoft Azure set and has maintained their goal of averaging 1.125 power usage effectiveness (PUE) for each and every data center they open.
The bottom line is that with Azure, you benefit from speed, scalability and lower operating costs – plus the burden of management is entirely alleviated. You don’t have to deal with on-premises hardware any longer.
If you’re interested in seeing what Microsoft Azure can do firsthand, then your next step is to start planning your migration.
How Do I Migrate From On-Premise To Microsoft Azure?
Migration can be a time-consuming process, but there are very few risks if it is approached with the right plan.
If you’re considering migrating independently, you should follow these six steps:
- Take An Inventory: Do you plan on moving completely to the cloud, or maintaining a hybrid environment? Some businesses don’t bother to migrate all their server-side architecture to the cloud – regardless of whether you do or not, you have to take stock of your servers, and associated software, to ensure it is all compatible with the new cloud environment you are planning.
- Plan Your Project Carefully: Be sure to specifically lay out how you plan to virtualize your back end. This will largely depend on your size…
- Small businesses – It would make sense to leave certain aspects like email and apps on-site, especially if they don’t require too much storage.
- Larger businesses – For your line of business apps and dozens of accounts associated with your email client, you can likely afford the cloud storage needed to host these aspects offsite.
- Determine Your Budget: The best way to figure out which cloud service you want to go with is to know how much you can spend. The price tag will help you sort out options. And don’t worry, a small budget won’t limit your options too much. A key benefit of the cloud is its scalability. In most cases, you can start small on a great cloud service, and scale-up and pay more later as you need it. Be sure to keep this scalability in mind from the start — do you anticipate needing to scale up by a considerable degree, within a year at the soonest? Make sure your cloud service of choice can handle where your business will be in five years.
- Consider Your Security: Depending on the industry in which you operate, you may have more pressing security concerns than other businesses. In order to maintain data security, or even to comply with certain regulations, you may need to keep some of your data on-site. Keep this priority in mind when determining whether you need a hybrid cloud environment or not. With a combination of onsite storage for secure data and a cloud platform for everything else, you can get the best of both worlds.
- Review & Refine Your Plan: Migration is an ongoing process. Make sure that, with every step you take, you’re reviewing your plan, checking your progress towards goals, and making sure you’re staying on track.
Are You Hesitant To Migrate To Microsoft Azure?
There are a number of concerns related to cloud migration:
- During the transition, you could lose some key files for good with no backup or redundancies to replace them.
- The migration, already expensive, takes longer than you expected and adds what you thought was avoidable downtime to your staff’s work life.
- Once it finally gets installed and launched, you find out the platform is overly complicated and difficult to learn, leading to more downtime for your staff.
Does that mean you should forget about the cloud and what it could do for you? Of course not. It just means you need the right people managing your migration…
Alliance Technology Partners Will Streamline Your Microsoft Azure Migration
Allow Alliance Technology Partners to help.
As your cloud partner, we’ll help you evaluate cloud solutions, find the right one, and seamlessly migrate to it:
- Alliance Technology Partners will work with you to assess, design, implement and support an Azure-based environment while reducing IT capital costs and increasing employee productivity.
- We define business and technology requirements before recommending a cloud strategy. Our team will work with business and technology leaders to help compare costs over time and determine what role cloud computing should play in your business plans.
- We assess the business value and business impact before presenting you with a customized cloud strategy. As part of this assessment, we will make sound recommendations on how you can best harness the advantages offered by Azure.
Contact the Alliance Technology Partners team to discuss a migration to Microsoft Azure.
