Migrating to the Cloud

The Cloud allows gained efficiency in configuration management, cost reduction, scalability, and by now you-should-know-this man! So how long should it take to move your company to the cloud? Typically we don’t move every type of workload at once; there is too much risk bundled in this kind of approach. So we try to isolate key workloads based on the following principles.

Is it Easy to Move?

How much investment is it going to take to move a workload to the cloud? You may want to define “low hanging fruit” because it has a small-time, cost, or labor investment.

A single server migration with no integrated services might work best for you because it has no strings attached. This type of workload should take less than a week probably a day at most.

Another scenario might be your old e-mail system that needs to be upgraded. This is the perfect time to transfer the workload. Depending on the amount of users and quantity of data, most migrations even with 5K users will take less than two months.

Do You Need to Try Before You Buy?

There are hundreds of technologies on-premises which now connect outside of the data center or use MPLS to connect directly into it. These scenarios allow you to do pilot hybrid configurations and deployments. The hybrid connectivity will enable you to move workloads in hours vs. days, and you can prove the service reliability and performance for development, test, and production.

Are You Currently Co-locating?

If your business is currently co-located or has a hub-spoke or star network footprint regionally or globally; the cloud can become just another location. You already have to concept of what types of services are needed at each site. This allows you to identify and consolidate resources dispersed across the company and standardize on cloud configurations. As long as you have redundancy routing in place to the cloud or direct circuits you’ve just upgraded to the ultimate data center.

Time to Cloud

Most organizations can move key organizational services like e-mail, document management, and communications to the cloud in less than two months. This is also true for migrating servers and configuring your data center to connect to the cloud so you can extend your operations. Although, to mitigate risk and handle resource constraints, these are not typically this is not done in tandem.

Tools to Help with Your Migration

There are tools built into System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Server 2012 to help with your migration, but Azure IaaS Migration Tool - Migration Accelerator is awesome!

Moving a website?

Check out the website migration assistant to see how easily you can move your web project to the cloud.

Once analyzed the migration assistant will also create the website(s) and database(s), under a given Azure subscription, required to support your site(s). http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/migration-assistant/