Why Cloud Migration is the Future?

Key Takeaways

Dave Rendón is a technical expert with more than a decade of experience with a strong focus on Microsoft technologies and Azure since 2010. He enables professionals to add value to their business with his expertise, taking advantage of Microsoft Cloud and AI advancements and appreciating his community contributions. Microsoft has awarded him the most prestigious Microsoft Azure MVP award for eight consecutive years.

Benefits in an organization by Migrating to Cloud

Cost Reduction – Cost reduction is one of the critical pillars when any organization considers or migration to the cloud. Because they will be able to manage all the services on a, usually pay as you go model, which is a more flexible model to handle all the IT assets.
Increase in Productivity – An increase in productivity is visible in all the organization not only in the IT teams but also to improve the security of all the IT assets. For instance, in Azure, we have the Azure Security Centre service. We have an Azure plan and a full ecosystem of services to leverage for our existing infrastructure.
Availability of Service – Organizations had to invest a lot in hardware and colocation services to improve or achieve high availability of all the services and applications running in a traditional data centre. In Azure, we can leverage some specific services to increase availability and acquire resiliency in the application.

Industries that are looking to spend most on cloud computing

Dave says that given the current situation that we are in, in this pandemic, Education and Healthcare are primarily spending more on the cloud, including some countries that weren’t taking advantage of the communication services available from a Microsoft portfolio standpoint. There are a lot of new mixed reality services available to improve these services.

Manufacturing will be another industry, with all the advancements and enhancements concerning financial institutions. They are now adopting these new technologies like blockchain to improve the quality of the service for its customers. He also adds up the Automation industry who are taking advantage of these new services, primarily available through cloud technology.

Common Challenges faced by organizations while migrating to the cloud

Dave advises following two different analyses before moving to the cloud,

Analyzing the requirements is an essential aspect of running the application in the cloud because not all the applications currently running on-premises are 100%.
Analyze all the core components of the application dependencies before migrating to the cloud.

Dave also points out that organizations look for an IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service movement to the cloud. Instead of going directly into a pass or a platform as a service approach, they want to start slowly by migrating the existing workloads on top of virtual machines and taking a PaaS or SaaS approach.

“Microsoft has done an excellent job in addressing the top challenges for any organization that is looking to move to any cloud provider, so they need to have a base knowledge. And I’ve seen good improvement on the Microsoft documentation on migrating any specific workload to the cloud. And that’s great to see. “- Dave

Automation is critical for any cloud provider

“Automation is key for any cloud provider” considering this statement, Azure has been improving a lot in the automation services in the cloud, not only with regards to the pure components in Azure but also with infrastructure as a code approach. Organizations can use the ARM templates through a virtual resource manager, but this new language for ARM templates is bicep and will help automate all the infrastructure in the cloud. It also includes the serverless approach.

Dave’s recommendations for organizations considering cloud adoption

Start with a baseline on the Azure fundamentals approach to learn all Azure’s principal or core services. From there, start digging a bit more on additional components, depending on the workload
Practice is the key to achieve your goals in the cloud. Practice through different approaches, use Microsoft learn, own an Azure subscription, and perform hands-on operations.
Make use of the Azure well-architected framework and review the technical communities out there.
Look at the Microsoft Azure implementation strategy, the fourth edition, Dave could co-author with other members globally from the MVP community. It is a free ebook from Microsoft, and it will give you a high-level overview of the core services and fundamentals of Azure.
And lastly, as the security piece of Azure is growing huge. There has been a lot of improvements with rights to Azure Security Centre. Dave strongly recommends looking at those services, starting with the Azure Security Centre, then analyzing how to protect your assets in the cloud on-premises. He also mentions that there is a specific technical community with regards to Azure Security.