Understand technical considerations
When you're making the shift to the cloud, there are technical considerations around how it will help improve how you manage and maintain your cloud and workloads. This guidance will help you discover the technical flexibility, efficiencies, and capabilities that aren't possible with your on-premises IT infrastructure and help you build a business case to migrate to the cloud.
Technical benefits
Scalability
Scalability, or the ability to scale out your resources depending on usage, utilization, and demand, is one of the foremost technical benefits of moving to the cloud.
Right-sizing resources and utilizing auto-scaling, matching the scalability needs, turning off workloads outside of business hours and scaling only when necessary have the added benefit of driving more sustainable workloads. Read more about the right-sizing recommendations in the Azure Well-Architected Framework Sustainability workload guidance.
Availability
On-premises, it's more costly to build highly available infrastructure. It's less costly to architect highly available infrastructure in the cloud.
Security and compliance
When it comes to security and compliance, Microsoft is continually expanding our security infrastructure and toolsets to keep you on par with what's transpiring with respect to security threats on global networks.
Capacity optimization
Capacity optimization, where you only pay for the resources you utilize over time, is another technical benefit of the cloud. The core concept to consider is how elasticity and on-demand resources help you deploy, provision, or deprovision resources more dynamically.
Sustainable IT infrastructure
Building a sustainable IT infrastructure is tightly connected to moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud. So how do we select the first project to migrate based on its potential sustainability impact?
Moving the first workload is usually aligned with the business goals, depending on how the migration aligns with an array of factors that lead to this decision.
Although sustainability is a key concept, in reality, it might be idealistic to believe it will be the primary decision factor for cloud migration. However, it is a significant added benefit and part of the continuous environment optimization efforts that align with the green strategy of a business.
Projected business outcomes can be synchronized with the sustainability benefits brought by the migration.
Resource-intensive workloads can be discovered using Azure Migrate.
Customers can also benefit from taking the Strategic Migration Assessment, analyzing the diversity of their workloads and the potential Azure destination mapping. Depending on the results and underlying complexity, one can define migration waves. Assess the carbon intensity using the Emissions savings estimator, which supports comparing the existing footprint of a workload compared to one in Azure, based on The Carbon Benefits of Cloud Computing: a Study of the Microsoft Cloud.
Identifying the first workload targeted for migration from a sustainability standpoint can be performed using the 80:20 rule – 80% of the emissions derive from 20% of the workload. This is a generic suggestion, of course, as a customer needs to perform their assessment based on the unique needs of its landscape and desired business outcomes.
Learn more about building a sustainable IT Infrastructure
Get the most out of your investment
Achieve more with your investment
With a shift to the cloud, it's important to think differently about how you'll consume and manage your cloud resources. As you build your business case, it's critical to understand the fundamental principles of cloud economics. When you plan short-term and long-term cloud solutions and align them to business outcomes, you can achieve more with every dollar you invest.
Align your partner strategy
The Cloud Adoption Framework approaches cloud adoption as a self-service activity. The objective is to empower each team, supporting adoption through standardized approaches. You can't assume that a self-service system will be sufficient for all adoption activities.
Successful cloud adoption programs typically involve at least one level of support. Some cloud adoption efforts require support from multiple partners working together towards a common goal.
Next steps
Learn how you can achieve more with your Azure investment.