03 December 2024 9 best practices for transitioning from on-premises to Microsoft Azure

Migrating from on-premises IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure is a transformative project that significantly enhances the scalability, flexibility, and innovation capabilities of your business. 

This transition, however, requires meticulous planning, effective collaboration and laser-focussed execution.  

If you are planning your journey into Microsoft Azure, here are some areas to focus on. 

A data-driven request for proposal (RFP) process is recommended to select a Microsoft solutions partner (MSP) that meets the criteria for your migration project and beyond.  

For Oak, we focussed not only on the Azure and migration experience of the MSP, but also beyond that. For example, cultural fit, the strength and depth of their MS Fabric and AI capability, and their ability to help Oak leverage the benefits of being in Azure and Microsoft E5 licensing, with particular focus on security, data governance, cost control and the up-skilling of the Oak team.   

Depending on the size of your business, this project may be all-consuming for your Technology team, you will need assess your internal capability to execute this change, and supplement the team as required.  

A blend of permanent and contract-based project team members not only helps you execute the project, but also ensures you have the internal skills required to continue your journey in Azure after the project has been completed.  

Ensure that there is a knowledge transfer process between the MSP and the vendors performing the work so that your internal team is equipped to manage and operate the Azure environment post-migration. Upskilling your internal team is critical to ensure you realise all of the benefits that moving to the cloud unlocks.   

It is crucial to have effective project governance around any large-scale project, in particular if, like Oak, you have many vendors and require them to collaborate effectively. The key to this is to have clear and effective communication around roles, expectations and delivery timelines.   

Consider governance as a continuous practice rather than a one-time tool, bake the tooling available, such as Azure Policy and planning tools such as the Azure Well-Architected Framework, Cloud Adoption Framework, throughout your project.  

You will need a strong and dedicated Project Manager who can coordinate across vendors and internal stakeholders. This is essential for smooth operations and keeping the project on-track.  

Clearly outline your business and technical objectives. Are you looking for cost savings, agility, global scale, or a combination of these? Understanding your goals will guide your migration strategy. 

Regular internal communication for all employees is essential. We used Teams heavily to collaborate with our MSP and vendors throughout the project, we provided weekly updates also by Teams, email, internal town halls and also animated videos explaining the difference between current and future state. We focussed not only on the functional change, but also on the benefits that being in the cloud will bring.   

Leveraging collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and DevOps pipelines can streamline team workflows during and after the migration. 

Begin with a thorough evaluation of your current on-premises infrastructure. Identify which applications and workloads can be moved to Azure, and which may need re-architecting or replaced with Azure services.  

Some applications may rely on specific on-premises configurations, libraries, or dependencies that are not compatible with Azure. Assess application compatibility early in the process to minimise disruption at a later stage. For applications with compatibility issues, explore modernisation options, containerisation, or the use of Azure App Service for hosting. 

In Oak’s case, we rebuilt our entire infrastructure and application stack to ensure we leveraged the full benefits of Azure. But this may not be possible in all cases, so thorough planning and exploration of your workloads and applications is essential.  Don’t forget to surface any dependencies between applications and services too.  

Consider a hybrid option for archive data to reduce Azure costs, you may have legacy apps that are not supported so a hybrid arrangement may be suitable for those workloads also.   

Microsoft offer numerous cloud design, planning and migration tools such as the Azure Well-Architected Framework, Cloud Adoption Framework, Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool and Azure Migrate.  

Consider any network changes required to support an optimised Azure delivery; you may require more network bandwidth, additional communication links and/or network traffic optimisation to support the move to Azure. 

I recommend that you PoC your agreed Azure design, this provides an opportunity to address any potential design changes and application issues.  It also provides a useful training environment to help upskill your team and provides a test migration base. Your PoC should be reflective of your production environment, this will enable you to validate not only technical feasibility but also cost implications and performance benchmarks. 

This is the stage where you will start to ask your business users to test things. Early testing is highly valuable to allow time for any required remediations.  

Now that your Azure environment is built and tested, you should consider putting any further changes through your established change control process. Vendors get used to changing things on the fly all too easily on a project like this so formal change management process should now be followed. 

Remember practice makes perfect, you cannot rehearse enough on a project like this, so dress rehearsal weekends are highly recommended. This will help you understand the migration process and timeline better, estimate costs more accurately and identify potential issues before rolling out to the wider organisation. 

This is a good time to test any high-availability and DR configurations to ensure those are performing as expected. 

The more time you put into dress rehearsals, DR testing and rehearsing, the easier your migration weekend will be. In fact, some of my team felt ours was something of an anti-climax!  

If possible, utilise Azure migration tools like Azure Migrate, Azure Site Recovery and Azure Database Migration Service to migrate your workloads. These tools help automate and streamline the migration process.  

Before moving to production, run test migrations to ensure everything works as expected. This helps with identifying and resolving issues without impacting your live environment. Ensure your business users have fully tested and are happy to proceed to production.  

Once testing is successful, proceed with the production migration. Ensure you have a rollback plan in case things don’t go as expected! 

So, at this point you have done all the hard work, it is back to basics as with any IT change; provide clear instructions and documentation, floor walking on every floor in each office. Ensure your support team are visible and available to assist anyone as required. 

If you have communicated the change, the business benefits and why you have embarked upon this journey, it will make your go-live and beyond so much easier because you have buy-in across the business.  

Establish hyper care and call logging processes with your MSP and key vendors for an agreed period of time, establish a way to clearly document and report any issues. Oak utilised MS Teams heavily for this and throughout the project, before pivoting back to our service desk after a few days of real-time support.  

Once you are live, continuously monitor your workloads using Azure Monitor and Azure Cost Management. Your MSP should be able to provide services to help you manage and optimise your cloud spend.  

Ensure you are utilising the latest tooling within Azure to monitor host metrics so you can pinpoint any pinch points and scale effectively. 

Ask your network support provider to monitor network traffic and to optimise network configurations to handle the increased traffic between on-premises and cloud environments. 

By following these steps and fostering collaboration among internal teams, your MSP and vendors, together you can navigate the migration process successfully.  

Remember, the journey doesn’t end with migration. Continuous improvement, governance and compliance are the key to leveraging the full benefits of the Microsoft Cloud and optimising the experience for your business and end users. 

Migrating from an on-premises environment to Azure is a transformative process that can significantly impact the operational efficiency and innovation capacity of your business. By leveraging Azure’s advanced tools and services, such as AI, machine learning, and IoT, businesses can drive innovation. This encourages a culture of creativity and forward-thinking.