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Published on February 2nd, 2023 | by Sunit Nandi

What Are the Best Practices for Azure Migration?

Cloud management describes exercising control over public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure to deliver the required resources and services. Public cloud services will be the main engine of growth in the market for digital IT services over the coming years.

While now is an exciting time to implement a cloud migration strategy, it can also be difficult and stressful. It would be best if you made numerous strategic decisions regarding which services are appropriate for your business like workday managed services, how to design and build your new environment, where to deploy sites, what processes to use for each area of migration, and so on.

Significantly, you must follow some industry practices if you plan to migrate some or all of your applications from on-premises servers to Azure or from AWS to Azure.

This blog post will look at Azure migration tools and best practices for implementing them.

Integration

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While integrating the company’s infrastructure with the cloud, it is critical to ensure data security and that all required workloads, support apps, and so on are operational. You can use the Site Recovery technique to ensure business continuity during migration.

In addition, most businesses often seek professional cloud migration experts to ensure a seamless migration. Such specialists follow Azure migration best practices for faster time to market and better control over security risks.

Decommissioning

Once your infrastructure has been converted to the cloud, you can begin decommissioning resources. However, don’t panic and shut down all of your physical servers. Allow the system to run in the cloud to ensure everything is in working order. After that, you can finish this procedure by disconnecting any connections between the cloud and on-premises.

Account for the dependencies

Any organization’s systems, regardless of size or industry, make use of a variety of apps that are linked to or connected to other sources. This translates into dependencies; it is critical to account for such dependencies and connection configurations during the strategizing phase to avoid service interruptions.

Downtime

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Although we understand that no one enjoys downtime, the nature of the migration process requires that you do so at some point. While there is no way to avoid this, you can minimize the impact on processes and operations by carefully analyzing and planning the downtime for each migration stage.

Governance

Depending on the industry and the specific set of standards that a company wishes to adhere to, ensuring compliance and governance may be critical to ensuring the overall success of the migration process. In such a case, the relevant teams, such as the cloud migration team, the IT governance team, and so on, must all be on the same page regarding the migration strategy and process.

Review audit and security logs

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Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) generates activity logs displayed in Azure Monitor. The logs record the operations performed in Azure tenancy and when and who performed them.

Audit logs provide a history of tasks performed by the tenant. Sign-in activity logs reveal who completed the tasks. Make reviewing logs a habit, or integrate your security incident and event management (SIEM) tools to review anomalies automatically. If you don’t have a premium license, you’ll have to do a lot of analysis yourself or through your SIEM system. Looking for risky sign-ins and events, as well as other user attack patterns, is part of the analysis.

What Is an Azure Data Migration Tool?

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Azure offers several tools and services for migrating data from on-premises to the cloud. The business case for migration determines the tools to be used. Let’s look at data migration tools and the use cases you might want to consider.

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA)

Customers using various database platforms can use SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) to move their data to SQL Server or Azure Synapse Analytics. Databases like MySQL, Microsoft Access, Oracle, SAP ASE, and DB2 are examples of supported source platforms.

SQL Server IaaS installations starting with version 2012 and later versions up to version 2019 (on Windows and Linux) or Azure SQL Database/Managed Instance are supported by SSMA. Only the SSMA tool for Oracle supports Azure Synapse Analytics as a target environment.

Azure Data Box

Azure Data Box provides data migration while maintaining high security in situations with a limited network or a short time frame.

Data Migration Assistant

Data Migration Assistant aids in the migration process by thoroughly analyzing on-premises SQL instances and determining their compatibility with a new version of SQL Server in Azure, Azure SQL Database service, or Azure SQL Managed Instances.

Azure Database Migration Service (DMS)

There are numerous PaaS and IaaS alternatives on Azure for hosting your databases. Azure Data Migration Assistant (DMA) and Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) assist in this process by evaluating existing databases, suggesting corrections as needed, and allowing the migration.

Azure Migrate

This is a comprehensive solution for organizing, supervising, and carrying out all front-end tasks.

Bottomline

Switching to Microsoft Azure Cloud is a significant change for the organization and its employees. As a result, experts worldwide recommend that businesses approach the transition with caution rather than diving in headfirst without careful planning and robust strategies to support the process.

Hence, take the time to ask and answer important questions about the reasons for the move, the benefits, the ROI, and so on. Then, assess your current infrastructure and capabilities to understand better how the decision to migrate applications to Azure will benefit your organization. And if you need assistance with the process, many expert service providers are available to help with the project.

Tags: Azure migration, best practices

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.