IT infrastructure is incredibly important for all enterprises. This infrastructure supports your internal services for staff and external services for customers. With that in mind, you can imagine how disastrous an infrastructure failure can be in terms of business continuity. Your employees may be left without critical software for their job role, and customers will be understandably upset to lose access to a service they have paid for.
For many enterprises, these infrastructure problems are caused by their on-premises datacenter. This on-premises hardware lacks the elastic scalability of the cloud, and outdated operating systems or proprietary software can reduce the functionality you have available. For that reason, migration to Azure has the potential to unlock new functionality that will significantly benefit your enterprise.
The Benefits of Infrastructure Migration to Azure
As with most cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure has many benefits that make it a better option than on-premises. These benefits include:
Faster Deployment – On-premises infrastructure is fully managed by your IT department. This means that your IT department must configure and maintain your server hardware to keep your services online. Manual configuration of server instances and other hardware can consume a lot of time for IT engineers, reducing your IT agility.
By moving to the Microsoft Azure platform, you have instant access to server hardware through the Azure Virtual Machines service. This means that your IT department can spin up a Windows Server environment in mere seconds, without needing to install operating systems or physically deal with hardware. By omitting the need for low-level hardware maintenance tasks, your IT engineers will spend less time installing and configuring, and more time optimizing and developing your services.
Unified Infrastructure Management – Another benefit of the Azure cloud is unified infrastructure management. By moving your infrastructure to Azure, you can configure and maintain your assigned hardware from a single access point. This simplifies infrastructure management for IT departments by reducing the complexity of accessing and viewing server information. Examples of unified infrastructure management on Azure include deploying to servers, monitoring resource usage, and provisioning new IT resources—all of which can be done through the Microsoft Azure Portal.
Scalable Infrastructure – Perhaps the most significant benefit of moving to the cloud is elastic resource scaling. With on-premises, your hardware is set in stone, meaning you have little room for processing capacity expansion as your business grows. This can bottleneck your services, resulting in slowdowns and outages until you upgrade your hardware.
With Microsoft Azure, you lease hardware from the provider as they manage it themselves. This leasing model also allows you to add and remove processing capacity depending on your requirements. With elastic scaling, Azure will monitor your resource usage and provision more resources to avoid performance problems. Once demand falls, Azure will unassign these resources to reduce your operating expenditure, hence the term elastic. This helps enterprises to sustain high levels of performance at all times, without overspending on the resources they do not use.
Infrastructure Migration Services to Azure with Trianz
Trianz is an industry-leading infrastructure migration consulting firm that is closely partnered with Microsoft. We currently hold both managed service provider (MSP) status, and cloud solution provider (CSP) status on the Azure platform—a testament to the cloud infrastructure competencies of our experts.
We offer a range of infrastructure migration services for the Azure platform, including:
Azure Infrastructure Migration Roadmaps – When migrating your infrastructure, the first thing you should do is build a roadmap. The roadmap will detail the server hardware, networking hardware, and any other infrastructure assets that you plan to migrate to Azure. This is important, as you will need to understand what Azure services are suited to your existing IT deployment for a lift and shift migration.
From here, we will link Azure services to your business IT requirements, forming a comprehensive plan of action for migration. This could include migrating your on-premises SQL database to the Azure SQL database service, Azure Virtual Machines for your on-premises Windows and Linux server deployments, or Azure Blob Storage for Sharepoint file migration and Disaster Recovery (DR) backups.
IaaS, PaaS, Serverless Infrastructure – When moving from on-premises to Azure, you get more than just access to remote hardware. The Azure platform offers a range of infrastructure types, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and even Serverless computing.
IaaS gives you access to the hardware, but still requires the configuration and maintenance of operating systems and software packages you install. PaaS is the same as IaaS, only the operating system is managed by Microsoft and provided as a platform for you to use. Then, Serverless completely removes the need for infrastructure management, instead allowing you to run code on-demand.
When moving away from on-premises, our experts understand how this complexity can quickly become confusing. Our experts will consult with you to determine which of the above solutions are suitable for your business, taking into account the workload type and any KPI targets you may have. We would recommend IaaS in most instances, with PaaS being suitable for API hosting and microservices. Serverless is ideal for DevOps workloads, supporting CI/CD, Kubernetes containers through AKS, and integration with the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Managed Infrastructure Services – By migrating to the Azure cloud, you can unlock swathes of new functionality that you would not have on-premises. You can take this a step further, and hand over the management of your new infrastructure to a certified managed service provider (MSP) like Trianz. This means that we develop, configure, and maintain your infrastructure deployment, so you can focus on delivering great products and services to your customers.
Our Azure Infrastructure Managed Service is the perfect foundation on which to host your IT services. Trianz experts hold official certifications on the Azure platform and have decades of experience with managing infrastructure in the cloud. This means you get access to expert support and guidance from our consultants, with the added benefit of not having to manage your infrastructure on Azure. Support is available 24/7/365 days a year, and our service level agreements (SLA) guarantee a minimum level of uptime for your services. This improves the availability and reliability of your digital services on Azure.
Migrating Your Infrastructure to Azure with Trianz
As you can see, the cloud has immense potential for enterprises that are still using on-premises infrastructure. With elastic resource scaling and infrastructure frameworks like IaaS, PaaS, and serverless, your enterprise can start benefitting from a tailor-made infrastructure solution that improves performance while reducing downtime. The icing on top is the reduction in operating expenditure by moving to Azure, which frees up valuable capital for other important projects.
Don’t let your infrastructure hold you back. Make a move to Azure, and start benefitting from a modern infrastructure deployment with Trianz.
