Migrate to Azure
Move | Improve | Operate
Migrating an on-premise or co-lo hosted application to a true cloud environment can be daunting. It is easy to just move an application to the cloud, but the fundamental constraints are simply different and requires you to rethink your architecture to get the most out of the Cloud.
Migrating an application to Azure can be as simple as just putting it on a Virtual Machine in Azure and be done with it. If you want to reap the full benefits of the Cloud, however, you may need to re-think some aspects of how you work. The rewards can be tremendous, in terms of cost saving, increased agility and better customer experience.
NewOrbit has more than a decade’s experience in developing for the Cloud and can help you map out your journey.
One of the biggest challenges when migrating to any cloud provider is the bewildering range of options you have. For example, there are at least eight different ways to host a website in Azure and at least four different ways of hosting a SQL database – and just one of those has half a dozen different pricing models to choose from. We will help you navigate this to decide on the best solution for you.
Our process goes through the following steps:
- Understand your business objectives
- Understand your technical situations
- Feasibility testing of specific parts, where required.
- Phased plan
- Implement in stages
- Operate and evolve
Each step is outlined in more detail below, with example questions. We will ask you many more questions during the consultation. Do bear in mind that many of the questions are over the top for many scenarios; we will evaluate the appropriateness with you based on your specific context.
Business Situation
| Area | Example questions |
|---|---|
| Understand your business | What are your growth plans? What is your technology plan? |
| Align business value with IT spend | What is the core competence of your business and what is just a cost? |
| How do you manage IT? | How is IT aligned with what the business needs? How are technology and spending decisions made? |
| What are your main drivers? | Ability to change quickly? Growth? Resilience? Security? Global reach? GDPR compliance? Saving costs? |
| What are your current pain points? | Stability? Costs? Lack of flexibility? |
Technical Situation
What is your technical landscape and how do you operate it? Which parts are you looking to migrate to Azure? Some of these areas may not be relevant to you – we’ll skip them where that is the case.
| Area | Example Questions |
|---|---|
| Overview | What systems do you have? Which of them do you want to migrate to Azure? |
| Hosting and Deployment | How do you host your systems today? How do you deploy new versions? How do you build the code? |
| Application structure | How is your application architected? Do you have a majestic monolith or microservices? How do you persist data? |
| Code Management | How is code developed and managed through to deployment? Do you use code reviews? How is the code and the system tested? Which source control system do you use? |
| Pain points | Difficult to make changes? Costs too high? Security a concern? Lack of scalability or resilience? Global reach? |
| Known performance bottlenecks | Do you have known performance bottlenecks in your current setup? Do you use SQL Server and, if so, do you have data on the load on it? Do you have background processing? |
| External dependencies | Do you use external, commercial libraries or services that are installed in your code? If so, do they have a cloud-friendly licence (some are per-server based, which can be problematic in the Cloud)? Do you call external services that require IP restrictions or leased lines (particularly certain Government agencies and some financial institutions)? |
Feasibility
The bottlenecks you tend to experience in the cloud are usually different from what you experience on-premise. Generally, you have a more controlled “performance envelope” that you have to fit within. Excessive I/O can be a problem as can relying on persistent, local file storage and using excessive memory.
There are ways to mitigate all of these, but in order to do so we usually have to measure and test. We often have a feasibility stage where we try to measure certain aspects of your system and run tests in Azure to establish the best solution for your unique situation. Sometimes we will also work with you to track the source of the issue in code and change the code, if required.
Phased Plan
Based on everything we have learnt in the preceding steps, we will develop a phased plan with you. This will often entail moving to Virtual Machines in the first instance to “get you to the Cloud” with subsequent phases moving you more and more to “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) services, which will save you further costs and increase your scalability, resilience and flexibility.
Implement
NewOrbit will help you to implement the phased plan, being there every step of the way to ensure it all goes smoothly.
- • We will set up the Azure environment for you, using our extensive experience of selecting the most appropriate tools for your situation.
- • We will work with your technical team to migrate the code and systems.
- • We will help you set up new monitoring tool.
- • We will enable new security features for you.
Operate and Evolve
We will provide you with a series of options for how you can reduce your cost, similar to the following.
Note: This is just an example – the list is usually a lot longer.
Implement
NewOrbit can help you implement some or all of the suggestions:
- • We can help to make the configuration changes in Azure.
- • We can work with your development team to investigate further what code changes may be required to implement other changes.
- • We can help design the architecture you need to make better of use of cloud capabilities to reduce cost and increase scalability.
Operate and Evolve
As you start to deploy systems to Azure, we are there to help you operate and evolve them, through our Azure support and access to our Azure experts. We have a team of highly experienced Azure architects as well as specialists in a wide range of Azure technologies. You have access to those as you need them and they can help you grow and evolve your system.
We offer a range of support plans to our Azure customers, from a responsive plan where we will respond to tickets raised by you, all the way up to plans where we actively monitor your application’s performance and respond to security alerts. For some of our clients we are engaged to proactively monitor and raise potential performance or security matters with their solutions, make recommendations and, often, help to implement ongoing improvements.
We have a comprehensive Partner Support Contract with Microsoft which allows us to escalate support tickets from our customers to priority support from Microsoft as well as enabling us to engage Microsoft experts on proof-of-concepts, and similar, with our customers.
Contact us to harness the power of Azure