Beyond Cloud Migration: Maximising Value in Azure

Our previous blog explored how Microsoft Cloud Migration Factory accelerates Azure adoption for your customers. But what happens after your workload has been successfully migrated? As a solution provider, your cloud expertise can help deliver long-term value to your customers, well beyond an initial migration.

Microsoft Cloud Migration Factory conducts a “lift & shift” migration into Azure, taking applications to the cloud as-is. It’s a major step towards digital transformation, but it’s far from the end of the journey – in order to truly harness the power of the cloud, you should aim to help your customers advance their newly cloud-based IT in three key areas: modernisation, optimisation, and security.

Cloud Modernisation

While the initial "lift & shift” approach gets workloads into Azure quickly, the real transformative power lies in modernising applications using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. By leveraging pre-packaged services in Azure, customers can easily modernise their applications to take full advantage of their new cloud infrastructure. Plus, if your customer’s new infrastructure is large enough to be eligible for the Azure Credit Offer, they can do so for free, using the credits they’re entitled to.

By taking advantage of the Azure’s native offerings, customers can use cloud-based tools to migrate a huge range of business processes. For example, Azure Files can modernise file sharing and management across on-premises and cloud environments, while Azure SQL allows for a transition from traditional SQL servers to a fully managed database service, boosting performance and reducing management overhead.

The potential of PaaS can even extend into the realm of device strategy. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) offers a powerful cloud-based virtual desktop, paving the way for your customers to a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy that gels seamlessly with their cloud environment.

By seeking out PaaS offerings to enhance their applications, your customers can easily build out their cloud environment. In contrast to on-prem or IaaS services, PaaS means that your customers don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure powering their IT – they can just focus on the workloads themselves.

Cloud Optimisation

With applications rehosted, cloud optimisation is an essential next step to ensure your customers find success in their new environment. Cost optimisation is likely to be at the front of your customers’ mind, as a lifted & shifted application can quickly run up a sizeable bill if not optimised.

Many organisations overestimate their resource needs after migration. This opens the door for you to add significant value by helping your clients right-size their resources based on actual usage patterns, rather than just replicating the resources their applications had on-premises.

It’s not difficult to do so - implementing auto-scaling allows resources to adjust based on real-time demand fluctuations, ensuring your customers only pay for what they need, rather than what they guesstimate.

If a workload doesn’t need that kind of flex, there’s an opportunity for even greater savings by leveraging Azure Reserved Instances. These are long-term commitments to host a given workload in Azure for 1-3 years. The cost for these commitments can still be paid monthly but comes with significant savings – sometimes as high as 70% compared to standard Azure usage.

While cost is important, it’s not the only optimisation opportunity available. Performance tuning is also critical. This usually involves refactoring customer applications and determining their exact resource needs to help them run better in Azure. Combined with modernisation, optimising application performance helps workloads work more efficiently than they ever could on-prem, delivering a real business benefit to your customers.

Effective monitoring and management are also key to cloud optimisation. Observability solutions like Microsoft’s own Azure Monitor, or other third-party tools, provide visibility across applications, infrastructure, and network to get to the root cause of any issues as quickly as possible, and identify areas for future improvement.

Cloud Security

Cybersecurity is top of mind for any business, so it’s vital you help your customers stay secure in the cloud. Once they’ve moved to Azure, they can take advantage of Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect their new cloud environment and employing cloud-based tools like Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) to bolster security across their environment – not just in the cloud.

Entra ID also unlocks conditional access policies, which add an extra layer of security by controlling access to cloud apps based on specific conditions such as user, device, location, and real-time risk detection.

But security shouldn’t end at what Microsoft can offer. AvePoint offers a secure way for customers to establish backups for Microsoft 365 and Azure-based applications, while NordLayer is a purpose-built cloud VPN that helps your customers stay secure while connecting into their new cloud instance.

Partnering for Success

We understand the challenges resellers and solution providers face in delivering post-migration value. We’re both a longstanding Microsoft Partner, and a dedicated cloud distributor, so we know where the biggest Azure opportunities exist, and how you can capitalise.

With comprehensive support and insights from our dedicated Azure Presales Specialist Danny Morfitt, we’re ready to help you guide your customers through modernisation, optimisation, and security enhancement, while developing a well-defined value proposition that helps you create maximum value from cloud.

Ready to take your cloud offering to the next level? Get in touch today to develop your own cloud know-how or get some help with guiding your customers through the cloud.