Cloud

Migration
Simplified
A guide for migrating infrastructure,
databases, and applications
Contents
Introduction............................................................3 Refactor apps and databases...................................18
Rebuild apps................................................................18
Why migrate now?..........................................5
Migration decision tree.............................................19
Migrating with the Microsoft Define migration timelines.......................................19
Cloud Adoption Framework...............8 Ready...............................................................................20
Define strategy....................................................9 Prepare your environment.....................................20

Executive sponsorship.............................................9 Landing zones: a primer..........................................22

Stakeholder alignment.............................................10 Additional landing zone resources.........................22

Engage your partner.................................................10 Migrate.........................................................................23

Plan....................................................................................11 Technical skills.............................................................23

Discover and assess digital estate......................12 Replicate workloads to Azure...............................25

Discover on-premises infrastructure, apps, Test migration before final cutover...................26

and databases.............................................................13
Cutover to complete the migration...................27
Identify application and server dependencies.....14
Analyze configuration................................................14 Decommissioning on-premises
infrastructure................................................................28
Plan costs......................................................................15
Migration plan.............................................................16 Innovate through cloud capabilities..................28

Align migration team.................................................16 Govern...........................................................................29

Define migration approach......................................17
Manage.........................................................................31
Rehost apps and databases.....................................18
Rearchitect apps.........................................................18 Summary....................................................................33

© 2020 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided “as is.” Information and views
expressed in this document, including URL and other internet website references, may change without notice.
You bear the risk of using it.
 01

Introduction

In recent years, there’s been a Many organizations now want to take advantage of
cost efficiency, scalability, security, and other benefits
rapid acceleration in the adoption the cloud offers. Data centers are expensive, with
of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) the costs of real estate, power, servers, storage, and
networks, plus operations staff tugging on a company’s
and, consequently, a shift in the bottom line. It’s no wonder that organizations see the
type of on-premises activities cloud as a way to reduce—or even eliminate—some or
all of these expenses.
being migrated to the cloud.1
Migrating to the cloud also allows for more flexibility
and scalability—or the ability to command growing
or diminishing resources to capably meet business
demands. Companies can rely on the advanced security
technologies found in the public cloud to protect
themselves against an ever-changing threat landscape.

While the benefits are worthy, the migration journey

can be complex. When you are in a position to move to
the cloud, it is essential to have sound guidance—from
strategy definition and planning, to governance and
management—and every step in between.

To perform migration, you need to

determine how to:
• Define business justification and create the initial
cloud migration plan.

• Assess your on-premises environment to understand

what workloads and applications you want to migrate.

• Perform the migration with limited impact to

the business.

1 The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure IaaS. A • Govern and manage cloud resources after
Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned by migration, making the most of your investment
Microsoft. August 2019.
and keeping it secure.

3
 This cloud migration guide is designed for IT “One of our big objectives
professionals running on-premises applications,
databases, and servers—assisting them on their end- was to eliminate $3 million
to-end cloud migration journey. in capital costs over about
In this guide, you’ll discover: three years, and to reduce
our operating costs by
Comprehensive guidance with best practices
and recommended tools and services. approximately the same
Preliminary steps to consider in preparing on-
amount. At the same time,
premises and cloud environments when looking we wanted to improve our
at migration.
quality of service. With Azure,
Migration strategies, including rehosting, we’re confident that we’ll
refactoring, rearchitecting, rebuilding, and
replacing your workloads in the cloud. meet those goals.”
How to accelerate your migration to drive
desired migration outcomes. Jim Slattery, Chief Financial Officer,
Capstone Mining
Tips for governing and managing migrated
Read the customer story
workloads after migration.

Migrating to the cloud doesn’t have to be difficult.

With the right tools and best practice guidance,
your migration project can be fast and friction-free.
An optimal migration approach can reduce costs
immediately and allow you to focus on future cloud
modernization. In addition, processes for assessment,
optimization, security, and management can help
throughout your continuing adoption of cloud resources.

Our goal with this guide is to provide you with

strategies and steps for planning and executing your
cloud migration. As we do so, we’ll introduce concepts
from the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for
Azure, a proven methodology that has helped many
customers in their cloud adoption journey. If you’re
still in the process of choosing a cloud vendor or may
have an intentional multi-cloud strategy, this framework
provides cloud-agnostic guidance for strategic
decisions whenever possible.

Using this e-book, you can get started with aligning

people, business strategies, and technology in your
organization, driving desired business outcomes, and
delivering fast results with control and stability.

4
 02

Why migrate now?

At first glance, migration might There are many benefits of the cloud, including reduced
running costs, faster modernization capabilities, and
seem like a technical decision—but increased security. But there’s usually a specific catalyst
at its core, it is business-related. for starting the migration discussion. These can include:

The discussion raises two funda- Operational efficiencies and reduced operating
expenses. With reduced hardware support, increased
mental questions: What’s driving manageability, and more efficient processes, you can
your business to migrate to the save an average of 20 to 30 percent on virtual machine
(VM) resource configuration alone. 2
cloud, and why now?
Decreased time-to-market/release. By reducing
management overhead and freeing up budget, you
can focus more time and effort on rapid software and
solution development. Faster deployment of IaaS and
platform as a service (PaaS) allows your business to
release faster and more often.

Support for urgent capacity needs. When you plan for

peak usage through on-premises systems, your servers
are typically under-utilized, as you need more capacity
than average to accommodate spikes when they occur.
The cloud releases you from this model, enabling a
scale-when-you-need-it approach.

Renewal of datacenter lease or hardware refresh. If

you’re currently extending your budget on renewing
hardware or paying for datacenter locations, it’s a good
time to consider cloud migration. A cloud vendor can
host these services for you, eliminating the need for
costly leasing.

Renewal of licensing. Nearly all companies have

an annual licensing agreement with their major IT

2 VM sizing calculations are based on the Microsoft Azure TCO

Calculator, which is available at: https://www.tco.microsoft.com/

5
 providers. These require ample budget to ensure the Ultimately, by migrating your current environment to
operating system (OS) and virtualization are sufficiently the cloud, you’re putting yourself in a better position to
covered. The cloud can help here as well, providing a accelerate your business. By reducing costs and making
pay-as-you-go offering to reduce this cost. management more efficient, a cloud platform can
immediately influence your IT group’s ability to invest
Application innovation. Two common challenges for
back into core strategic projects, increasing security
today’s businesses are over-allocated IT resources
and reliability while advancing development.
and on-premises platforms that limit the adoption of
modern services. The cloud provides an integrated When business drivers and timing align, it is time for
platform for modern development that can increase cloud migration—and Azure can help save money and
efficiency of developers and rate of team efficiency by improve efficiency. In the next section, we touch upon
50 percent.3 migrating with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework.

Software end-of-support. Organizations sometimes

find that software they are using is reaching an end of 3 The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Azure Serverless Platform.
A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned by
support date. For example, Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft. July 2019.
SQL Server 2008 both have reached end-of-support
life cycles, which means the end of regular security
updates. This can be an opportunity to migrate your
end-of-support workloads to Microsoft Azure and get
extended-support security updates for a maximum of
three years after the product's end-of-support date.

This can help you to strengthen your organizational

security posture and ensure compliance across your
hybrid environment.

Why Azure
Migrate efficiently on your own terms

Optimize costs and migrate with confidence

Save money with the most cost-effective offers for Windows Server and SQL Server. Confidently migrate your
workloads to Azure with best practices, expert guidance, and cost optimization tools.

Stay secure and resilient across hybrid environments

Protect workloads across your hybrid environments with intelligent security services backed by 3,500
cybersecurity professionals. Use built-in resiliency to avoid costly business interruptions.

Scale your workloads and applications on demand

Increase agility with best-in-class Azure infrastructure that scales to your business needs. Reduce operational
burden with fully managed application and database services in Azure.

6
 Figure 1. Common migration triggers

In addition to the factors that trigger your move to the cloud, you should consider the range of workloads and
applications that can be migrated. As an example, below are just a few of the common workloads that customers
migrate to Azure.

Figure 2. Common migration projects

When business drivers and timing align, it is time for cloud migration—and Azure can help save money and improve
efficiency. In the next section, we touch upon migrating with the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework.

7
 03

Migrating with the Microsoft

Cloud Adoption Framework

Every organization has its own This requires a cloud provider (and core partners) that can
deliver a comprehensive set of tools and methods to help
reasons for migration. Whatever simplify and accelerate migration and reduce overall risk.
your reasons are, you can achieve Most of all, you need a simple process that’s easy to
your goals successfully by following follow. You can simplify your cloud adoption journey
by breaking it into phases. The steps you take should
a well-structured approach that allow you to get a clear picture of your overall migration
addresses your various business, readiness and your entire application and workload
portfolio—and the best way to configure that portfolio to
technical, and organizational needs. achieve migration.

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework provides proven

guidance, best practices, tools, and templates to support
your adoption journey through the different phases. The
guidance covers strategy and planning, as well as the
ongoing governance, optimization, and management of
the migrated workloads. With this proven approach, you
can execute your migration project with confidence.

In the following chapters, we’ll discuss migration phases

that have helped others move to the cloud and provide
you with considerations for each phase.

8
Figure 3. Common migration journey
 04

Define strategy

The cloud delivers fundamental To take advantage of this potential, you need
to document your strategy in a way that’s both
technology benefits that can understandable to cloud technicians and palatable
help your enterprise execute on to your stakeholders, illustrating the reasons your
organization should migrate to the cloud.
multiple goals.
Defining your strategy starts with initial exploration of
the concept of cloud adoption and culminates in a more
specific business case and commitment from leadership.

Executive sponsorship
To get commitment from leadership to pursue migration,
you need to spell out your migration drivers. Establish the
root business case for migration, along with the urgency
and timelines associated with it. Within this business case,
it’s important to distinguish between business drivers,
technical drivers, and timeline drivers, as your approach to
the migration can shift.

In getting buy-in from executive leadership, you should set a

strategy to ensure success, consisting of the following:

• Guidance on why the organization is migrating

• Assigning people and teams

• Allocating budget (with expectation to refine later)

9
 Stakeholder alignment Engage your partner
Since migration involves coordination between multiple Another part of your strategy is determining when to
functions, it’s important to achieve alignment. Being enlist external support for your migration.
able to speak in terms of business outcomes supports Your cloud adoption team performs the actual
transparency and cross-functional partnerships. migration of workloads to the cloud. To define the
To succeed, you need to count on the right level digital estate or build the core cloud infrastructure,
of support from IT, security, and other areas of the the team executes a repetitive series of collaborative
business—most importantly, the application owners and problem-solving tasks.
who will be affected.
With the Microsoft partner system as a resource, you are
To maintain application owners' support throughout empowered to identify what tasks to perform with your
the migration effort and to avoid any surprises, in-house IT teams, and what tasks may require expert
include them in early planning exercises and reinforce assistance. Work with your existing Microsoft partner
the benefits of their application being hosted in Azure. if you have one, or find a Microsoft partner to leverage
IT infrastructure groups (for example, networking, their deep expertise in the planning and execution of
security, identity, etc.) should also be part of design migration projects. They can help your cloud adoption
and planning discussions. team overcome any execution anomalies, so migration
proceeds quickly and without missteps.

We recommend working with Azure Expert Managed

Services Providers or other specialized partners, as
they have deep cloud technical know-how, consistently
deliver customer success, and are validated each year
by an independent auditor.

10
 05

Plan

When beginning a migration, you Once you understand those aspects, you also need to
know how much it will cost.
first need to know what you’re
Many workloads can run immediately on Azure without
dealing with. That means getting a modification; other workloads, which have operational
better understanding of what your and application dependencies in an on-premises
environment, require further analysis and planning.
applications are, how many servers If your applications are composed of multiple servers
and/or VMs you have, and how you’ll or VMs, you should invest in consolidated planning to
identify and shift them to the cloud. This isn’t a manual
move these components to the cloud. process, and you need intelligent planning tools to do it.

Similarly, getting accurate cost comparisons can be

challenging when you’re estimating the load and Azure
VM instances. Without automated analysis to map on-
premises capacity to the VM instance, your estimations
might fall short—causing performance issues. Or your
estimations could be too high, stretching your budget.

11
 Discover and assess Tool for understanding
digital estate migration readiness
Before migrating a workload to the cloud, it’s important Start your migration journey by
to assess the workload and each related asset. understanding your level of readiness for
scale migration with the Strategic Migration
In an ideal migration, every asset (infrastructure, app, or
Assessment & Readiness Tool (SMART).
database) would be compatible with a cloud platform
and ready for migration. In reality, not everything This tool addresses your readiness across all
should be migrated to the cloud, and not every asset is dimensions of migration, from initial strategy
compatible with cloud platforms. to ongoing management. By answering a few
questions, you’ll get a customized report that
Ultimately, the goal of assessment is to collect
will help you plan and close gaps.
information about servers, VMs, applications, and
databases, including type, configuration, usage, and
applications that might be running.

With cloud migration tools, you can not only assess

your on-premises infrastructure, apps, and data
readiness, but also analyze assessment data to map on-
premises capacity to Azure VM instances and estimate
cloud cost.

Azure Migrate provides a hub of tools and services

to discover, assess, and migrate servers, databases,
and virtual desktop infrastructure. It also seamlessly
integrates with partner independent software vendor
(ISV) offerings to provide additional capabilities.

12
 Tools for assessment Discover on-premises infrastructure,
apps, and databases
To assess servers and VMs, Azure Migrate:
Server Assessment helps you discover and assess It’s likely that your organization runs hundreds—if not
on-premises VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and thousands—of servers and VMs. While your current
physical servers to determine whether they’re management tools might have a good representation
ready for migration to Azure. Azure Migrate also of these, to kick-start any migration, you need an
allows you to export or download reports with assessment mechanism that can feed data into
discovery data for further decision-making. subsequent steps.

For SQL database assessment, Data Migration Discovery is when you inventory your apps and the
Assistant can help you in detecting compatibility roles/features running on your on-premises machines.
issues that can affect database functionality in your Discovering servers and VMs is usually a straightforward
new version of SQL Server or Azure SQL Database. process. It relies on interaction directly with the endpoint
It also recommends performance and reliability (using an agent) or managing hypervisor (such as
improvements for your target environment. VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V).

13
 Identify application and server Analyze configuration
dependencies
Assessment enables you to ensure that each workload
Once discovery is complete, you need to map any will function on your cloud platform. Through the
dependencies or communication between your servers collection and analysis of data, assessment tools can
(and applications). give you metrics on the readiness of the workload in
the cloud. For example, is the OS that the workload
Dependency analysis within Azure Migrate helps you to
runs on supported? Or are there specific hardware
understand dependencies across machines that you want
dependencies that might not be replicated in a cloud
to assess and migrate. You typically use dependency
environment (such as running a UEFI boot on a disk
mapping when you want to assess machines with higher
that’s larger than 4 terabytes)?
levels of confidence and ensure all the components of
an app are moved together. This is critical because when Configuration analysis should show you workloads that
migrating an application, you need to know all the servers will migrate with no modifications, those that might
and processes the app is using. require basic modifications, and those that are not
compatible in their current formation, as well as provide
Many tools provide server dependency mapping but
guidelines to remediate potential issues or recommend
don’t provide application dependencies. To ensure a
configuration changes.
full picture of all communication among workloads, you
need a tool that performs both. This allows you to create
visual maps of all your applications and workloads, which
enables their interaction as a single entity for costing,
configuration analysis, and eventually migration.

Figure 4. Visualize dependencies Figure 5. Export dependency data

14
 Plan costs Tool for cost planning
The final stage of this assessment is collecting resource The Azure TCO calculator helps you build a
usage reporting (such as CPU, memory, and storage). customized cloud assessment business case
This is important because on-premises VMs are often to support an Azure migration. Be sure to
over-provisioned, but underutilized. If you were to take include all your hardware, software, facilities,
the physical configuration of your on-premises server and the cost of the team that currently
and map this to an Azure VM series type, you’d likely supports your on-premises environment. You
find that you’re paying for more performance and scale have the option to modify any assumptions
than you need. so that the model accurately reflects your
Because the cloud is costed as a usage model, you business. The result is a detailed report that
should ensure your choice meets both performance and shows how much money you can save by
economic targets. The goal in any cloud model is to drive moving to Azure.
your VM’s efficient levels of utilization, while making sure For more planning resources and calculators,
you meet performance and reliability goals. Through try these Azure cost planning tools.
historic resource analysis, intelligent cost analysis tools
can determine the actual usage of your workload and
suggest the best cloud Azure VM series to use.

If your workload is running on Windows or using

SQL Server as a database, migrating to Azure can
maximize the benefits. The assessment solution can
identify where programs such as Azure Hybrid Benefit,
reservations for cloud resources, and extended security
updates best fit into your migration to improve your
budgeting and forecasting.

To evaluate the potential cost savings of migrating to

Azure, calculate and compare your total cost of ownership
(TCO) for Azure with that of a comparable on-premises
deployment. Additionally, create an estimate of costs for
the migration project, including professional services,
development, and training for your team.

The TCO estimate and business case should be essential

to the assumptions for migration planning. You can always
refine these later as the team works through migration.

15
 Migration plan Align migration team

Using your application inventory, prioritize your An important aspect of any cloud migration plan is
applications into a migration plan based on dimensions aligning the people who will make the plan a reality.
such as business priority and complexity. Then define To create a balance between speed and control during
the core team who will execute migration and define cloud migration, you should have people accountable
the right approach for your business case. for cloud adoption and cloud governance. This might be
a team of people sharing responsibilities for each area
or capability. Or you might assign individual people to
be responsible for the outcomes and the work.

Once you’re done with the team structure alignment

for your cloud migration plan, the next step is to map
specific people to the necessary capabilities. To do so,
answer the following questions:

• What person (or group of people) will be

responsible for completing technical tasks in the
cloud migration plan?

• Who will be accountable for the team΄s ability to

deliver technical changes?

• What person (or group of people) will be

responsible for implementing protective
governance mechanisms?

• Who will be accountable for the defining those

governance controls?

• Are there other capabilities or people that will have

accountability or responsibility within the cloud
migration plan?

16
 Define migration approach Migration strategies can be boiled down to four main
categories: Rehosting, refactoring, rearchitecting
Your cloud migration strategy depends on many factors: and rebuilding. In addition, some organizations find
• What are your most pressing needs? it helpful to replace some applications with SaaS
(software as a service) applications, rather than
• What are the skills on your team?
migrating older ones.
• Where are your apps in the development life cycle?

Once you’ve decided on your migration goals and

gathered all the requirements and constraints from
your assessment, you’re able to define your migration
strategy. Choose the best method of migration that
meets your business and IT requirements, such as
workloads that don’t require code and app changes,
workloads that require minimal changes before shifting
to the cloud, or workloads that require modified and
extended code and app functionality to take advantage
of cloud technologies.

Your migration could require you to run parallel and

iterative migration processes as you progressively move
your apps and workloads to the cloud. Whether your
migration is simple or complex, it’s helpful to think of
the basic elements of the process.

Figure 6. Migration strategies

17
 Rehost apps and databases Rearchitect apps
Also referred to as “lift and shift,” this strategy entails The rearchitect strategy is also known as “redesigning”
migrating your physical servers and VMs to the cloud an application to modernize it—that is, to transform it
just as they are, without any changes to the code. with a modular architecture. Rearchitecting modifies or
extends an existing application’s code base to optimize
By simply shifting your current server environment
it for a cloud platform and for better scalability. Cloud
straight to IaaS, you reap the benefits of cost savings,
provider services can be used directly as back-end
security, and increased reliability. The advantages of this
services of modern apps, which are highly scalable and
strategy include: moving quickly with no code changes,
reliable. The advantages include: improving agility by
the ability to have a cloud provider manage hardware and
applying innovative DevOps practices, bringing new
operating systems, and realizing lower TCO quickly.
Azure capabilities to existing apps, and cost-effectively
meeting scalability requirements.

Refactor apps and databases Rebuild apps

Also known as “repackage,” refactoring involves using The rebuild strategy revises the existing application by
additional cloud provider services to optimize the aggressively adopting PaaS or even SaaS architecture.
cost, reliability, and performance by refactoring your The advantages of this strategy include: building new
applications. Your application can take advantage of applications using cloud-native technologies, faster
IaaS and PaaS products such as Azure App Service, development if your existing application is slowing you
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, and containers. down, innovation opportunities that take advantage of
The advantages of employing modernized services advancements in technology like AI, blockchain, and IoT.
in this scenario include: lower cost and management,
using your current application as-is or with some minor
code or configuration changes, and connecting to new
infrastructure services.

18
 Migration decision tree Define migration timelines
Adopt a simple migration decision tree to drive decisions Any cloud migration project should have a well-defined
based on the company's priorities and requirements. timeline for migration execution. Establishing timelines

For example, if you are not planning on future for estimating migration efforts requires project
management capabilities, such as work breakdown
development of your business application, you can
structures (WBS), commonly used as a sequential
select the rehost strategy and move the application
project management tool. The WBS represents how
quickly to IaaS. Or, if you want to realize the full benefits
dependent tasks will be completed over time.
of the cloud over time and include future development
with PaaS offerings, you can choose among refactor, For more flexibility, your team can employ agile and
rearchitect, and rebuild strategies. other iterative methodologies built on the concepts
of iterations and releases. With an iterative approach,
you can align efforts to the timeline and adjust the
scope as the project requires. Iteration duration
commonly depends on the type of technical effort, the
administrative overhead, and the team’s preference.

Figure 7. Migration decision tree

19
 06

Ready

In order to start building and This can be accomplished by first organizing resources,
controlling costs, and securing and managing your
deploying solutions using organization—and then keeping teams on track with
Azure services, you need to a platform foundation and landing zones, which are
explained later in this section.
prepare your environment for
the cloud adoption plan. Prepare your environment
Organize resources: Setting up a management
hierarchy allows you to consistently apply access
control, policy, and compliance to groups of resources
and use tagging to track related resources.

Figure 8. Levels of management scope

20
 Manage access: Use role-based access control to make sure that users have only the permissions they really need.
Managing who can access your Azure resources and subscriptions is an important part of your Azure governance
strategy, and assigning group-based access rights and privileges is a good practice.

Figure 9. Pattern for assigning Azure role-based access control (RBAC)

Manage costs and billing: Identify your subscription Before you start your governance planning, use the
type, understand how billing works, and learn how to Governance Benchmark tool to identify potential gaps
control costs. in your organization's cloud governance approach.

Azure Cost Management can help you plan with cost in Establish monitoring and reporting: Get visibility
mind. It can also help you analyze costs effectively and across resources to find and fix problems, optimize
optimize cloud spending. performance, and gain insight into customer behavior.

Plan for governance, security, and compliance: Enforce

and automate policies and security settings that help
you follow applicable legal requirements.

As you establish corporate policy and plan your

governance strategies, you can use tools and services
like Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, and Azure Security
Center to enforce and automate your organization's
governance decisions.

Azure resources
Azure offers many services that together provide a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on
telemetry from your applications and the Azure resources that support them.

• Azure Monitor provides a single unified hub for all monitoring and diagnostics data in Azure.

• Azure Service Health provides a personalized view of the health of the Azure services and regions you use.

• Azure Advisor is a free, personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow and implement best practices for
Azure deployments.

• Azure Security Center can help you monitor the security of your machines, networks, storage, data services,

21 and applications.
 Landing zones: a primer existing workloads to the cloud. Landing zones use
defined sets of cloud services and best practices to set
Infrastructure as code is a common requirement for you up for success.
most cloud adoption efforts. The shift to code-first The benefits of using the platform foundation and
environment creation can add a learning curve for team landing zones together include consistency across
members, and impact operations, security, governance, security, reliability, performance, cost and cloud
and compliance. Deploying discrete, purpose-built operations. The combination also reduces the
landing zones helps to address those challenges and overhead that comes with maintenance, governance
keeps the team on track with adoption plans. and compliance. Together, the platform foundation
Start with a platform foundation: A shared platform and landing zones capture everything that must be
foundation supports all workloads in a specific cloud in place and ready to enable cloud adoption across
platform. It provides centralized controls for identity, the IT portfolio.
security, operations, compliance, and governance
to the landing zones—governing all workloads, and
Additional landing zone resources
establishing a consistent baseline across the shared- The Azure setup guide allows you to become familiar
architectural pillars of security, reliability, performance, with the tools and approaches needed to create a
cost, and cloud operations. It is critical to establish the landing zone. This provides guidance in choosing
platform foundation before deploying landing zones, the most appropriate landing zone option, and
because its centralized controls are shared across establishing a code-based starting point for your first
landing zones. landing zone environment.
Build landing zones in your environment: A landing The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework is a
zone is the basic building block of any cloud adoption helpful reference for developers and architects who are
environment. The term refers to a logical construct deploying solutions within a landing zone, and wish to
that enables workloads to coexist on top of a incorporate and build on the shared-architectural pillars
platform foundation. when designing, building, or supporting workloads that
A landing zone is a segment of a cloud environment run within a landing zone.
that has been pre-provisioned through code, and is
dedicated to the support of one or more workloads.
Landing zones provide access to foundational tools and
controls, and establish a compliant place to innovate
and build new workloads in the cloud, or to migrate

Figure 10. Landing zone blueprints

22
 07

Migrate

While many core management skills It’s also essential to put a well-designed landing zone in
place at the onset of a migration project, consisting of
are useful in the cloud, there are setting up networking, identity, management, security,
some key skill differences—so your and governance.

team will need to get up to speed on As with the earlier phases of the framework, you can
tackle readiness by breaking it into parts:
some new tasks.
• Develop skills for your cloud migration teams.

• Create a landing zone to host the workloads that you

plan to build in the cloud or migrate to the cloud.

Technical skills
Prepare your teams with the cloud skills necessary to
migrate workloads and operate them once in Azure.
Microsoft Learn has free, self-paced learning so
your teams can get the necessary skills for executing
migrations. For those new to Azure, we recommend
starting with Azure fundamentals. These migration
resources will further help your teams prepare for
migration and post-migration duties.

Microsoft offers a range of Azure training courses,

certifications, and exams with different levels and
specializations. Aligning with the roles that will make
up your migration team, these programs can help you
build skills in your team as well as identify suitable
candidates when hiring.

Microsoft Learn further helps with skills readiness challenges by providing unique learning paths focused on job roles.
This tool offers simple online training in bite-sized pieces, practical labs, and assessments to test knowledge. It’s a fast
23 way for your team to grow their skills. Best of all, it’s free.
 Now it’s time to begin your migration to the cloud. framework, or architecture; it simply means hardware
Earlier in the guide we described the strategies that and OS are managed by the cloud provider.
you can use for migration—progressing from rehosting Begin the migration waves with your first workload to
your apps to refactoring and rearchitecting, and finally Azure. You should become familiar with the tools and
to modernization. approaches needed to scale adoption efforts. As you
Determine the strategy that best meets your get familiar with cloud migration, you can increase
requirements—this is usually addressed on a per- levels of complexity to simplify and automate the
application basis. A per-workload basis is equally migration process—such as DevOps, infrastructure as
important. It is lower risk, allows for learnings, and lets code, and so on. Using a gradual migration approach
you choose the appropriate migration method for each allows your organization to become more comfortable
workload. Learning about migration scenarios is a vital with migration as you progress through the project. In
step in the process. completing the project later, you can migrate the more
complex applications.
In many cases, organizations will start with lift and shift
to drive rapid migration and early cost savings. Let’s Azure Migrate is a central hub to discover, assess,
focus on the rehost strategy—moving applications and migrate workloads to Azure. Let’s detail the steps
running on traditional servers and VMs to Azure required for using it to rehost your application workloads.
IaaS. Rehost requires no change in an app, workload

Figure 11. Migration waves

24
 Replicate workloads to Azure
Replication is the first step of the Migrate phase, where you migrate on-premises VMs by copying them across
to Azure. Asynchronous or synchronous replication ensures that live systems can be copied to Azure with no
downtime. Most of all, systems must be kept in lockstep with on-premises counterparts. This means that while
you’re building and executing your migration plans, any data or server updates are synced between the copies.

Figure 12. Replication with Azure Migrate

This model is also useful for connecting groups of VMs, should define the storage and network connections
such as a multi-tiered application or workload, during that you set up when initially creating the environment.
migration. This is important for testing and the final Application-aware replication helps you easily
migration cutover. Once you review the details, you’re migrate business applications with Azure Migrate,
ready to start replicating the servers. The replication understanding the actual context of an application. You
will keep the servers fully synchronized with the on- can automatically use this feature for commonly used
premises versions until you’re ready to migrate and Microsoft enterprise applications such as SharePoint,
retire the on-premises versions. Dynamics, SQL Server, and Active Directory, plus apps
Pulling in data and insights from the assessment, Azure from other vendors like Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Red Hat.
Migrate can configure each VM to replicate to the
correct VM instance in Azure. This is also when you

25
 Tools for migration
To migrate servers and VMs, use the server migration tool in Azure Migrate. It helps you migrate on-premises
VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, other virtualized machines, and public cloud VMs to Azure.

Migrate your existing application databases with the Azure Database Migration Service, whether they are running
on SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. It allows you to migrate databases to Azure as a VM, Azure
Managed Instance, or directly to Azure SQL Database.

Test migration before final cutover

The next step of the Adopt phase is testing, which ensures system health before final cutover and that migration will
work as expected. Test migration simulates the migration by creating an Azure VM using replicated data. Testing
doesn’t affect the on-premises machines, which remain operational and continue replicating. You can use the
replicated test Azure VM to validate the migration, perform app testing, and address any issues before full migration.

To establish that workloads function as expected, you might want to test migrated resources in isolated partitions
in Azure. With Azure Migrate, you can fully test a set of VMs in an isolated environment without affecting the on-
premises or cloud production versions. After you’ve completed VM replication, and as you perform delta replication
for the real-time replication, you can run a test migration for the VMs before running a full migration to Azure. We
highly recommend that you do this at least once for each machine before you migrate it.

Figure 13. Test failover

26
 Cutover to complete the migration
After you’ve verified that the migration works as expected through testing, it’s time to perform the final cutover
to migrate the on-premises machines. Azure Migrate can also perform the final launch in your cloud and turn off
the on-premises application. In some cases, you’ll have to update domain name system (DNS) records for the new
cloud-based workloads. However, if you migrated using DNS in the cloud as part of your initial environment setup,
this might happen automatically.

Figure 14. Final cutover

27
 Decommissioning on-premises infrastructure
Once you’ve promoted a workload to production, the assets that previously hosted the production workload are no
longer required to support business operations. At that point, the older assets are considered retired. Retired assets
can then be decommissioned, reducing operational costs. Decommissioning a resource can be as simple as turning
off the power to the asset and disposing of the asset responsibly.

Decommissioning is an important step when cost savings are your primary motivation for a migration. Until an asset
is decommissioned, it continues to consume power, environmental support, and other resources. After retired assets
are decommissioned, migration is complete.

Figure 15. Decommissioning

Innovate through cloud capabilities

Now that you’ve migrated your application workloads to Azure, you have a chance to unlock and expand business
capabilities through cloud adoption-related innovation. By developing a new innovative solution, you can
modernize existing apps or create new solutions for your core business processes, ultimately driving business value.

28
 08

Govern

Governance and compliance are Governance provides mechanisms and processes to

maintain control over your applications and resources
required throughout a migration in the cloud. It involves planning your initiatives and
effort. But those efforts don’t setting strategic priorities.

end with migration. Once you’ve To begin with, identify key areas of importance during
and after migration. These areas should relate to the
migrated, you’ll want to keep your different types of risks your company must address as
VMs continuously secure, protect it adopts the cloud service—and actions your cloud
governance team should take.
your data, and monitor your
cloud health. Consider these principles of the governance model:

Corporate policies drive cloud governance. Governance

focuses on specific aspects of corporate policy,
including identifying business risks, converting risks
into policy statements, and ensuring adherence to the
stated policies.

Five disciplines of cloud governance. The disciplines

are cost management, security baseline, resource
consistency, identity baseline, and deployment
acceleration. Each discipline supports corporate policies
and protects your company from potential pitfalls.

29
 Tools to govern
The Governance Benchmark Tool provides a first step
to identify your organization’s governance needs
and get recommendations. This is a questionnaire-
based tool designed to help you identify gaps in your
organization. It provides a personalized report that
outlines the difference between your current state and
business priorities, and tailored resources to help you
get started.

30 Figure 16. Corporate policy and disciplines of cloud governance

 09

Manage

Establishing good operational As with governance, management is an ongoing

process. Well-defined guidance can help your
practices for your migrated organization in expanding your IT management and
workloads helps to avoid costly operations so that you’re using secure, cost-effective
processes and modern, cloud-first tools for your cloud-
business disruptions and ensures based solutions.
your applications run optimally. The business and technical approaches you develop
are key to cloud management. These approaches
include establishing and expanding the management
baseline by defining the criticality classifications, cloud
management tools, and processes required to deliver
your minimum commitment to operations management.

Define business commitments by documenting

supported workloads and cloud management
investments for each workload. Also take into account
the advanced operations for platforms or workloads
that have a higher level of business commitment. These
workloads might require a deeper architecture review to
deliver on resiliency and reliability commitments.

For simplified and optimal cloud management and

operations, you should consider:

Business alignment efforts, which aid in capturing the

business impact and negotiating management costs.
Alignment assures everyone that you’re using the most
appropriate operational management processes and tools.

Cloud operations disciplines, to establish levels of

operations management. These disciplines support
workloads and business commitments such as
inventory and visibility, operational compliance, and
protect and recover.

31
 Tools to manage
Simplify your strategy for data protection with Azure Backup, which provides secure and cost-effective
solutions to back up your data and recover it from the Azure cloud platform.

Use Azure Monitor to gain full visibility into your applications, infrastructure, and network. Azure Monitor
provides a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and acting on telemetry from your cloud and
on-premises environments.

Azure Well-Architected Review allows you to assess your workloads with respect to best practices, and offers
actionable next steps.

Figure 17. Business alignment and the cloud operations disciplines

32
 10

Summary

Regardless of the reasons for • Define strategy: Identif y a specific business

case and commitment from leadership for
migration or the complexity of your application migration.
current environment, a successful • Plan: Create a clear plan that takes into careful
cloud migration relies on separating consideration your servers, VMs, and workloads you
want to migrate—and what’s required for these to
the process into phases: function in the cloud. Along with this assessment,
determine your true usage of resources and analyze
any configuration dependencies for your workloads.

• Ready: Prepare your on-premises and cloud

environment for migration.

• Migrate: Before you actually migrate a workload (or

several) to the cloud, make sure that your workloads
are in sync with your on-premises system in real
time. Along with this, test the health of your system
so that your final cutover is smooth.

• Govern: Govern the environment and migrated

workloads to ensure industry standards and
regulatory requirements are addressed.

• Manage: Define management baselines and business

commitments to achieve tangible business outcomes.

33
 Using the information outlined in this guide, start
with a few applications, then expand to more of
Additional resources
your environment. Continue your cloud journey • Accelerate and automate your migration—
by pursuing even greater cost efficiency through visit the Azure Migration Center for helpful
optimization and keeping your workloads operating migration tools.
securely at peak performance.
• Find curated, step-by-step guidance
The benefits of migration can be immediate in terms from Microsoft experts and specialized
of time and budget. The cloud can help you be migration partners based on the Microsoft
more agile and, in many cases, help you respond to Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
business needs faster. Reducing your TCO allows you
• Get trained for your migration with
to take that massive savings and invest it back into
foundational and role-specific courses
your business to drive faster modernization. Plus, you
to develop new Azure skills and long-
can explore PaaS and SaaS options, decreasing your
term organizational readiness.
TCO even further while expanding your IT capability.

Whether you’re in the early stages of assessment

or planning your approach, the Cloud Adoption
Framework offers an easier approach for migration.
With free integrated services, programs, a strong
partner ecosystem, and proven guidance from
Microsoft, you can tread a well-forged path to
minimize risk to your business.


Take the next step
Try Azure for free

34