Skills and Tools for Azure Cloud Migration

Successful cloud adoption is the result of properly skilled people doing the appropriate types of work, in alignment with clearly defined business goals, and in a well-managed environment.

azurecloud August 9, 2023

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This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Migration and Cost Optimization Practices

Having developed your Cloud Migration strategy and plan, you can then begin the process of building the team and enacting the migration.

Successful cloud adoption is the result of properly skilled people doing the appropriate types of work, in alignment with clearly defined business goals, and in a well-managed environment.

Skills and Team

To deliver an effective cloud operating model, it’s important to establish appropriately staffed organizational structures, aligning your organization to the migration requirements.

During the readiness phase of a migration journey, the objective is to prepare for the journey ahead. This phase is accomplished in two primary areas: organizational readiness and environmental (technical) readiness. Each area might require new skills for both technical and nontechnical contributors.

To Develop the Skills Needed for Cloud Migration, an organization can build:

Cloud Strategy Team: Defines motivations and business outcomes, and validates and maintains alignment between business priorities and cloud adoption efforts.
Cloud Governance Team: Ensures that cloud-adoption risks and risk tolerance are properly evaluated and managed, and identifies risks that can’t be tolerated by the business, converting risks into governing corporate policies.
Cloud Operations Team: Focuses on monitoring, repairing, and remediating issues related to traditional IT operations and assets.

Organizations can Adapt Existing Skills and Align Responsibilities so that key decisions can be made such as Approving Architecture Designs.

Migration Tools

Microsoft offers Azure Migrate to simplify migration and modernization with a unified platform:

Discover and assess on-premises resources.
Plan your move with technical and business insights into infrastructure, databases, and applications.
Migrate to Azure in phases and modernize for faster innovation and a higher return on investment (ROI).
Track and manage your cloud migration progress using a central dashboard for ease of management.

Best practices are documented to Cost and Size your migration and How to Scale a Migration, which can be supported by tools like Azure Lighthouse, which enables service providers to perform operations at scale across several tenants at once, making management tasks more efficient.

In this video you can learn How to migrate your VMs, databases, and apps to Azure using Azure Migrate.