Migrating Applications to Azure Cloud

Most business owners seek ways to optimize their company's processes, increase efficiency, and save on resources. A popular solution to achieve these goals is migrating to the cloud platform.

The Gartner report states that 65% of application workloads will be prepared for cloud delivery by 2027, up from 45% in 2022. It emphasizes the perspective of cloud migration. However, this process needs careful planning and implementation.

Application Migration to Azure Cloud: Key Benefits

Optimized Resource Allocation

Shifting your infrastructure to the cloud allows your organization to cut down significantly on operational costs. By eliminating the need for on-premises maintenance, you reduce the expenses associated with hardware repairs, system upgrades, and manual upkeep. Additionally, migrating to the cloud enables better resource utilization, ensuring your computing power is distributed efficiently across all operations. The cloud also helps minimize real estate costs by reducing or even eliminating the need for large physical data centers. With a pay-as-you-go model, companies can optimize their budgets, reducing unnecessary spending and focusing resources where they matter most.

Greater Flexibility and Scalability

Cloud services allow you to dynamically adjust your computing power based on your company’s evolving needs. Unlike traditional IT infrastructure, which requires upfront investments in hardware that may remain underutilized, the cloud provides a flexible solution where you only pay for what you use. This is especially beneficial for businesses experiencing fluctuating workloads, seasonal spikes, or rapid growth. Whether you need to increase storage capacity, processing power, or bandwidth, cloud providers offer scalable options that can be activated instantly. This adaptability ensures your business stays agile, responsive, and capable of handling any unexpected demand surges without overpaying for unused resources.

Advanced Security Measures

Security is a top priority for any organization, and cloud providers invest heavily in ensuring data protection. With built-in security features such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and access control, cloud platforms offer multiple layers of defense against cyber threats. Additionally, cloud providers continuously update their security protocols, including automated patching and real-time threat detection, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional security measures that require dedicated in-house teams to manage, cloud services integrate cutting-edge security tools that proactively monitor, prevent, and mitigate potential risks. This ensures that sensitive company data remains protected while reducing the burden of security management on IT teams.

Regulatory Compliance

For organizations operating in industries with strict regulations, such as finance, healthcare, and government, compliance is non-negotiable. Leading cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure are designed to meet industry-specific regulatory requirements, ensuring businesses remain compliant with legal and security standards. This includes frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certifications, providing businesses with the confidence that their data handling practices align with legal mandates. By leveraging a cloud provider with built-in compliance capabilities, companies can reduce the complexity of meeting regulatory obligations, avoid costly penalties, and streamline audits with detailed reporting and automated compliance tools.

Built-in Backup and Recovery

Data loss and system failures can have catastrophic consequences for businesses, making backup and disaster recovery critical components of IT strategy. Cloud providers offer automated backup solutions, ensuring that data is continuously saved, encrypted, and stored across multiple secure locations. Unlike traditional on-premises storage, where backups are prone to physical damage, theft, or corruption, cloud-based recovery systems allow businesses to restore lost data almost instantly. Additionally, cloud providers offer failover mechanisms that ensure minimal downtime in the event of an outage, providing uninterrupted access to essential systems. This high level of resilience not only enhances business continuity but also reduces risks associated with data breaches, human errors, or cyberattacks.

Streamlined Management and Monitoring

Managing a complex IT infrastructure can be overwhelming, but cloud platforms simplify the process through centralized management tools. Cloud-based dashboards provide administrators with real-time insights into resource usage, system performance, and security metrics, allowing for more efficient oversight. Additionally, automation capabilities help streamline tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance, reducing the need for manual intervention. With AI-driven analytics and predictive insights, businesses can optimize performance, detect potential issues before they escalate, and make data-driven decisions. By consolidating IT operations into a single, user-friendly interface, cloud services enhance operational efficiency, reduce administrative overhead, and empower organizations with better control over their digital assets.

Microsoft Azure is a leading cloud platform

Microsoft Azure is a top cloud platform with a market share of 25% of the worldwide cloud market in 2024. MS Azure offers a wide range of services for its users, and here are the main ones:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Microsoft Azure provides virtual machines, data, and storage. It also offers network resources, helping businesses scale their IT infrastructure. Files and Azure Blob Storage are among the top IaaS services offered by the Azure platform.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS). Consider MS Azure if you need tools and an environment for creating and deploying web and mobile apps. The PaaS solutions comprise Azure App Service, Azure Functions, and Azure API Management.
• Software as a Service (SaaS). Provides access to cloud-ready apps. These include Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory, and Dynamics 365.

Reasons to pick Microsoft Azure among other cloud platforms

With a pay-per-use pricing model, this cloud provider helps save on IT infrastructure. By migrating to MS Azure, you will cut the need to buy costly software and hardware. We have already explored benefits of Azure for small businesses.

When you pick a cloud provider, the selection will depend on the project you want to complete. All cloud providers offer different ranges of products. They might be a better or worse fit for the issue you will tackle.

Microsoft Azure is a popular solution for enterprises that use other Microsoft services. This platform will benefit both small and large businesses. It is also vital to note that Microsoft Azure even offers discounted services.

Top pros of application migration to Azure

Global network

Microsoft Azure is among the largest cloud service providers after Amazon AWS. This platform has built an extensive global network to support its customers from every country and region. This geographic accessibility enables close monitoring, regardless of location.

Increased availability

Azure's network also provides high availability to minimize the risk of downtime, fraud, or hardware failure. With a single data center, such incidents can often happen.

Disaster recovery

Your business can continue operating even during disruptions. Microsoft's disaster recovery system can help. Azure is a top Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provider. It offers higher security than your on-premises data center and is lower-cost to maintain.

Speed and flexibility

Azure migration tools can make migration easy and quick. It allows organizations to complete their migration on time and get long-term benefits faster. Also, Azure's SQL elastic database pools enable efficient scaling when the workloads increase.

Compliance with the requirements

Azure offers over 100 compliance certifications and over 35 industry certifications. These include compliance documents covering healthcare, finance, government, and more. The Microsoft Trust Center provides more information about each certification.

Seamless integration with Microsoft

Azure may be a less expensive option for members already using Microsoft products and tools because of its quick and easy integration into the existing system. Joining the Azure cloud also offers many unique privileges and benefits.

Consider offers such as Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit. They will help you save money from the start and make it easy to adjust your usage over time until your plan is right.

Step-by-step Azure migration process

Moving from on-premise to Azure cloud migration strategy includes the following key steps:

Step 1: Assessing your current environment

Applying cloud migration assessment tools, you need to inventory the virtual and physical servers in the current environment and collect information about the profile and performance of your applications. As a result, you will have a full inventory of servers with metadata for each, allowing you to craft a cloud migration strategy.

Let's summarize what should you do at this stage:

• Collect info about each part of your IT infrastructure.
• Check the readiness of your workloads for migration.
• Estimate the cost and complexity of migration.
• Document the results.

Step 2: Planning your migration

Make a detailed plan for what you hope to achieve during your move from on-premise to cloud migration Azure platform. During the planning stage, you must evaluate your staff's skill set.

Before using Azure, getting support from a trusted cloud partner is best. You can contact EXB Soft for quality team extension services with top specialists. They will assist you every step of the way in migrating to the cloud.

Below are the main points when planning your migration:

• Determine objectives.
• Assess your current on-premise apps environment.
• Decide on the best migration strategy.
• Set a schedule and allocate a budget.
• Find out and prevent risks.

Now, let's discover what popular migration strategies exist that may fit your needs:

• Rehost (lift and shift): This is one of the simplest migration methods. It means applying IaaS services to redeploy workloads to a cloud environment. You can migrate apps and all their dependencies to the cloud with rehosting. During the migration, the operational and configuration structures of workloads remain unchanged.
• Refactor (architect): This migration type requires a complex restructuring of workloads to allow cloud capabilities. It means that apps can support enhanced features, including serverless computing, distributed load balancing, and auto-scaling.
• Repurchase: You replace internal administration systems with third-party managed services from cloud providers. These services help teams eliminate old systems and move to the new SaaS subscription model.

Step 3: Preparing Azure environment

You can customize your Azure environment by creating a subscription and building resource groups. Configuring networking components such as VPN gateways or virtual networks will help you establish hybrid connectivity.

During the preparation stage, you must check that your on-premises environment is ready for migration and verify that you have all the required resources for this procedure.

Here are the steps you have to complete:

• Be sure your workloads are compatible with Azure.
• Use pre-migration testing to assess your migration strategy and identify potential problems.
• You need to configure Microsoft Azure resources, security, and networks.

Step 4: Replicating data

Now, select the best data migration service. You can choose Azure Data Box or Azure Database Migration Service for complex datasets. When migrating to a new environment, it is vital to check data integrity and consistency.

Step 5: Migrating

The migration step is moving your on-premises workloads to MS Azure. It is the final transfer of applications from one environment to another.

You can migrate your apps using Azure Site Recovery or apply for Azure App Services or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Keep the following points in mind while migrating to the cloud:

• Follow your migration strategy by applying your selected method of migration.
• Monitor the migration process closely to discover and resolve any issues quickly.
• Your applications should run correctly in your Azure environment, so check it.

Step 6: Post-migration testing

It is vital to test migrated workloads in a staging environment before transferring them to production. Quality testing is necessary to verify that your apps work correctly in the new environment. Check the performance, safety compliance, and connectivity of all components.

Let's see what the validation stage involves:

• Conduct quality testing and be sure all components are operating correctly.
• Examine security measures and requirements for compliance.
• Review and document the migration process and its results.

Step 7: Monitoring and optimization

After migration, streamline your resources for cost and performance. Azure Cost Management and Monitor tools will be helpful. You may create an alerting and monitoring strategy with Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Once the entire deployment has been migrated and tested to work, optimizing resources to improve connectivity takes time.

Full optimization includes the next actions:

• Tune settings for top scalability and performance.
• Use native Azure services to save costs and enhance the system's functionality.
• Carry out continuous optimization and monitoring. These practices will help you discover and solve any problems after migration.

Step 8: Transition and support

Your team should be trained to manage your new cloud infrastructure effectively.

After migration, it's time to monitor your workloads and check if everything is working well. Once everything is verified, you can start shutting down the old environment from which you migrated.

Here are some points to keep in mind when post-migrating:

• Apply continuous monitoring and management systems.
• Your staff must have relevant expertise to work in the new Azure environment.
• Keep track of your settings and recommendations.
• If necessary, update your DNS records to redirect traffic to Azure.

From on-premise to Azure cloud migration: key challenges

Here are some of the main hurdles enterprises often encounter when moving to the cloud:

Financial issues

You should have clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs) for post-migration costs and savings. Without them, finance management becomes challenging. Cloud environments are constantly evolving, so costs fluctuate with the introduction of new services and increased application usage.

Data security and compliance

Ensuring data compliance and security is a number-one priority because cloud services offer a shared responsibility model. It means that the provider offers infrastructure security, and the customer, in turn, protects data and workloads. It requires careful setup and strict adherence to safety measures.

A professional cloud migration team will help you eliminate these challenges. You can hire Azure developers at EXB Soft. They will help you transfer your apps to the cloud with minimal costs for your enterprise. Our skilled Azure DevOps engineers will make the migration process seamless and fast. Just contact us to get more information and request engineers’ CVs.

Conclusion

Migration to the MS Azure cloud can be a powerful tool for optimizing and transforming your business. Azure offers various services, innovative capabilities, and continuous development. Using this cloud provider, you can adapt to changes in the working environment. You will improve business efficiency, save costs, and outperform competitors.