Adopt
At this point, you've established your business justification and defined your business outcomes. You've prepared your organization. Your people and your Azure environment are ready to deploy your prioritized applications. You're ready to adopt cloud technologies following the selected digital estate rationalization path.
As discussed, your organization has unique motivations to adopt the cloud. They all converge into migration or innovation to the cloud.
Watch this video to learn more.
Cloud migration
Cloud migration is the process of moving existing digital assets to a cloud platform. Existing assets are replicated to the cloud with minimal modifications. After an application or workload becomes operational in the cloud, users are transitioned from the existing solution to the cloud solution.
Cloud migration is one way to effectively balance a cloud portfolio. This is often the fastest and most agile approach in the short term. Conversely, some benefits of the cloud might not be realized without additional future modification. Enterprises and mid-market customers use this approach to accelerate the pace of change, avoid planned capital expenditures, and reduce ongoing operational costs.
The strategy and tools you use to migrate an application to Azure largely depend on your business motivations, technology strategies, and timelines. Your decisions are also based on a deep understanding of the application and the assets to be migrated. These assets include infrastructure, apps, and data. This decision tree serves as high-level guidance to help you select the best tools to use based on migration decisions.
Migration preparation: Establish a rough migration backlog, based largely on the current state and desired outcomes.
- Business outcomes: The key business objectives that drive this migration. They're defined in the Plan phase.
- Digital estate estimate: A rough estimate of the number and condition of workloads to be migrated. It's defined in the Plan phase.
- Roles and responsibilities: A clear definition of the team structure, separation of responsibilities, and access requirements. They're defined in the Ready phase.
- Change management requirements: The cadence, processes, and documentation required to review and approve changes. They're defined in the Ready phase.
Cloud innovation
Cloud-native applications and data accelerate development and experimentation cycles. Older applications can take advantage of many of the same cloud-native benefits by modernizing the solution or components of the solution. Modern DevOps and software development lifecycle (SDLC) approaches that use cloud technology shorten the time from idea to product transformation. Combined, these tools invite the customer into the process to create shorter feedback loops and better customer experiences.
Modern approaches to infrastructure deployment, operations, and governance are rapidly bridging the gaps between development and operations. Modernization and innovation in the IT portfolio create tighter alignment with DevOps and accelerate innovations across the digital estate and application portfolio.
Here are the key points from this unit:
- Cloud migration is the process of moving existing digital assets to a cloud platform. Adopt is divided into two different options, migrate and innovate.
- Each cloud migration activity is contained during one of the following processes, as it relates to the migration backlog: assess, migrate, optimize, and secure. Then, you manage each backlog asset.
- Modernization and innovation in the IT portfolio create tighter alignment with DevOps and accelerate innovations across the digital estate and application portfolio.
You've learned how to plan, get ready, and start to deploy your first applications to the cloud. Now let's talk about governance and management in the cloud.