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How To Successfully Transfer Your Traditional Applications To Azure

Your organization’s business goals and the type of application you are transferring will determine how you migrate your business applications to Azure. Business applications, especially outdated legacy systems that have been in place for decades, have specific characteristics that require expert planning. These application migration processes should address all data requirements, security, compliance, and integration requirements.

Data Integration Challenges:

1. Conduct A Swot Analysis

First, make an unbiased assessment of the pros and cons of cloud migration. What are the advantages, disadvantages, threats and opportunities of cloud migration?

Analyzing SWOT extends your relocation strategy beyond the technical level. It should include everything from connectors and pricing for third-party software to employee training, security and compliance.

By taking a comprehensive, holistic perspective, you can proactively anticipate and prepare for potential operational, financial, technical and training difficulties.

2. Assess Your Environment

Before you start planning your move, you need to examine your current infrastructure.

Microsoft offers a number of migration tools that provide a complete inventory of servers, devices, performance metrics and profile data for creating a cloud migration strategy.

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an inventory and reporting tool that assesses IT infrastructures in preparation for Azure migrations. It enables IT professionals to assess the readiness of physical and virtual workstations for migration to Azure.

The MAP toolbox helps you review and document your current workloads, applications and procedures, including

  • Infrastructure network topology
  • Capacity
  • Performance requirements
  • Availability
  • Failure safety requirements

In addition, the tool helps you identify the maintenance practices that will support your new cloud environment.

3. Your data is not properly structured

Next, choose your migration approach from lift and shift, application evolution, and application re-architecture.

Lift and Shift

Lift and shift migrations copy everything exactly as-is to the cloud. Migration of an application requires little effort, but it wastes resources and increases operating expenses. You may likely be required to pay for data you are not now using.

 Application Development

In an application evolution, cloud-native components of the application are identified. This strategy enables consumers to move to the cloud in stages, rather than all at once, but it may incur higher operational costs.

 Application Re-Engineering

Application re-architecture deconstructs and rebuilds applications with a more scalable, contemporary design. You are not starting from scratch, but this removes code that limits your agility and retains and improves business-critical functionality.

This approach is appropriate for older apps that continue to be business-relevant and provide distinctiveness. With Azure Service Fabric and other microservices, Microsoft Azure has made it easy to rewrite an application from scratch for the cloud.

The cloud is not applicable in all circumstances. There might be desktop connectors that only function on your present servers.

 Or, you may have a high-performance application that would be too expensive to execute in the cloud. In this situation, a hybrid cloud migration might be the optimal choice.

4. Run A Pilot Migration

Next, it is necessary to start a pilot or test migration in preparation for the actual conversion.

A pilot migration allows you to test the application in simulated environments that closely resemble real-world operations.

Before the official rollout, it is necessary to observe how users interact with the new environment and fix any bugs. Pilot testing is time-consuming, as users test the program according to their typical usage patterns.

Despite the time involved, it is a low-risk strategy to identify potential difficulties prior to the transition.

5. Migrate Your Legacy Application

Now that you have assessed and prepared your current workloads and applications, you should have a plan for effectively migrating your legacy application to Azure. Below are some examples of recommended practices.

Be sure to back up all data before transferring your legacy application to Azure so that nothing is lost during the conversion process.

After the conversion, testing is essential. Make sure all data is present. Double check security and compliance. Make sure all users have access to all necessary resources.

Migrating an application is complex. You can spend a lot of time and money researching best practices and Azure tools and planning for any potential issues. But attempting to convert legacy applications without the proper knowledge is not worth the risk.

Even if you have internal IT staff, they may not have the Azure or migration knowledge necessary to enable a smooth transfer. Hiring a professional to transfer legacy applications may make more sense than trying to do it all on your own.

6. Manage your cloud use and associated resources

After migrating to the cloud, applications hosted in Azure must be continuously inspected and adjusted to maximize cloud performance. Otherwise, you may wind yourself paying for unnecessary services and storage space.

Azure Advisor and Cost Management for Azure can help you manage cloud resources:

Azure Advisor: Personalized suggestions inside the Azure interface to maximize performance, availability, and cost.

Cost Management: This tool monitors Azure expenditure, cost and use statistics, warnings, and suggestions to remove idle cloud resources and ensure you only pay for what you need.

TECHLADDER will migrate your application to the cloud

Whether you are migrating an accounting system or your main CRM system, working with a partner like TECHLADDER makes the entire process easier. Our staff will relocate your systems, minimizing downtime and maximizing production. We also help you manage your applications on an ongoing basis, maximizing the return on your cloud investment

Ready to stop worrying about your outdated, slow applications?

Learn more about our application migration expertise or request a free assessment now.

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