“Modern workloads and race to the public cloud. What did evolution teach us, did man slowly kill off all other species and became the dominant creature by luck?” Reflecting on a book I read recently; “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari, it suggests that things are going to change and the more we adapt, the better prepared we’d be for the future.

If anything, the pandemic has taught us over the past few years that it is possible to change fast, and that adapting to new ways of living is not impossible. The software revolution is upon us; therefore, it is critical that companies move their workloads faster from a traditional on premises environment to a managed cloud to make way for their staff to work on value added propositions such as building software to better serve their customers.

The article ‘Why software is eating the world’ written by Marc Andreesen in 2011 predicted that in the decade ahead, major companies and markets would shift to a more software dominant value proposition. Over the time that has elapsed, we are now witnessing that revolution.

Migration to Microsoft Azure is a well-established and a growing use case for many modern companies. There are many migration paths and tools built by Microsoft and its partner network to make these migrations seamless. There are also many reasons why organisations migrate their workloads to the cloud, such as when data centre leases run out, to improve agility, legacy IT systems and poor IT support by existing vendors to name a few. As companies face these challenges and assess their IT strategy for growth, moving to a managed cloud environment is a no brainer. Weighing options and having a good understanding of the new infrastructure portfolio you would own going forward, is critical to taking advantage of the benefits the move will offer.

Cloud native benefits:

  • Cost and management optimisation
  • Security and compliance
  • Disaster recovery and cloud native backups
  • Scalable and agile build cycles
  • Seamless integration with DevOps and development
  • Reservations, and premium industry support via direct Microsoft and wider partner network

The approach you take to achieve your cloud migration journey is as important as the reasons for wanting to do it. Microsoft Azure has a well-defined approach for cloud migrations, and the Five R rationalisation has been identified and these are the most common options for a migration. Depending on your company’s maturity within the IT space, application complexities and defined migration timelines, these approaches will need to be analysed by an Azure migration specialist or an Azure certified architect to provide feedback to internal teams, so that the best method can be identified.

What are these rationalisation methods?

  • Rehosting or lift and shift migrations
  • Refactor can also be categorised as moving the workload to a cloud native PaaS based model
  • Rearchitected, these can be time consuming and careful consideration needs to be given to cost vs benefits for this approach
  • Rebuild, like the previous re-architecture option rebuilding an existing application requires business input and analysis done on best case for the future growth, this may be an application that previously met the needs of a business function but now unsupported with current business processes. To resolve this, you might want to consider rebuilding the application using cloud native technologies.
  • Replace solutions are typically implemented using the latest and the best technologies that exist in the market at the time, a good example is replacing your old exchange server with office 365 (SaaS) product.

Continuous growth and investment in innovation will define the future of many companies and how they perform. Geoffrey Moore discusses strategy around core and context analysis framework in which he explains how companies should invest in core value propositions and manage context items with minimal resources while offloading as much as possible to out of the box services such as SaaS products or managed services and so on (ref: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/core-and-context/). This is the opportunity for modern companies to transform in the new digital era and provide their customers with smart, highly curated services, while still generating profits for the business.

Why is a well-architected framework an important aspect of the cloud migration and cloud adaption journey?

Adapting to change is not straight forward and having the workforce trained and skilled to manage this new environment takes time. As you start the process it is important to partner up with a reliable service provider with experience which can assist you through the journey.

A well architected framework is a standardised set of guidelines that is defined by Microsoft Azure for customers who are starting the journey or wanting to uplift their current workloads to industry standard best practice methodology. There are five pillars that are defined and those are identified by experts as critical for a successful cloud adoption path. Namely they are Reliability, Security, Cost Optimisation, Operational Excellence and Performance Efficiency.

Customer satisfaction is one of the main goals as a business. Imagine a moment where you were shopping for a product online on a website and it crashes in the middle of your cart journey; you wouldn’t have been a happy customer. With the move to a software centric business model, many fortune 500 companies rely heavily on their underlying environment’s reliability and Azure cloud provides that guarantee to avoid such a situation. This is another reason why one of the five pillars highlights how important reliability is; and harvesting cloud’s many capabilities to drive up reliability of the underlying systems will assist with successful adoption.

Cloud security is one major pillar of the well architected framework, and zero trust security model is the approach in which security should be structured to tackle future security threats. The model also provides layered barriers for intruders with AI driven intelligence. Layered security model assists to manage and monitor user behaviours in a grand scale and many software defined security technologies provide intelligent surface for AI based protection. Microsoft Azure cloud is built from the ground up on such principles. As such, these pillars are defined to validate enterprises online real estate and make sure they are aligned with industry standards and major global certification such as ISO 27001. The ISO 27001 is a set of controls that provide governance standards to guide information security internationally.

Moving workloads to a managed cloud environment will provide its own set of capabilities, therefore it is useful to have some understanding of cloud economics and what benefits are available. There are support services built within the systems to manage costing efficiently and drive the infrastructure cost down. A popular option is reserving your workload instances or services for a pre-defined period. There are other options such as use of Azure advisor reports, use of automation runbooks to programmatically scale up or down resources depending on your needs, use of tagging to diversify your cost centre and finally, make use of Azure policies to enforce good practices across your environment from ground up by setting up well defined landing zones.

While transformation of your IT infrastructure and workforce to a cloud native world is not a straightforward or a simple task, the expertise provided by an experienced cloud migration partner will ensure all critical aspects of a digital transformations are well thought through and managed with great caution.