Cloud migration journey

Discover and assess your environment

Reduce risks and ensure a smooth migration process using Azure Migrate to build an inventory of the servers and databases in your environment.

Assess your apps to identify dependencies between servers and include all the necessary app components in your cloud migration plan.

Take advantage of the centralised repository in Azure Migrate to get end-to-end visibility and tracking of your migration progress.

Make your business case

Evaluate the potential cost savings of migrating to Azure by calculating and comparing your total cost of ownership (TCO) for Azure with that of a comparable on-premises deployment.

Use the Azure TCO calculator to create a customised business case for migration to Azure.

Get estimates of storage and compute costs in Azure using Azure Migrate.

For even more value, right-size your migrated virtual machines (VMs) to your workloads – with offers such as the Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances.

Plan and prioritise

Prioritise your workloads into migration waves based on their business impact and complexity.

Create your detailed plan of migration waves using this template – with milestones to help app owners and your cloud team to plan their involvement.

Build technical skills and support-readiness

Prepare your teams with the skills necessary to migrate workloads and operate them once you’re in Azure.

Define your support needs, address any current gaps and ensure that your business and IT employees are prepared for the changes and new technologies.

Discover free, self-paced learning from Microsoft Learn to empower your teams to build the skills that they’ll need for migration.

Prepare your cloud environment

Set up a landing zone in the cloud for your new Azure workloads.

Use the cloud adoption framework migration blueprint to quickly set up a cloud environment.

Implement a pilot migration

Run a pilot migration wave to get your teams familiar with the migration tasks, including the use of Azure migration tools, testing and cutover.

Use these migration scenario guides to assist you as you execute the steps of migrating VMs or databases.

Iterate through your migration waves

Expect the project to accelerate as your migration team gets more familiar with the approach and you institute repeatability.

Establish governance practices

Once you’ve migrated your workloads to Azure, build and scale your applications quickly while maintaining control by implementing governance practices.

Learn more about cloud governance disciplines to help you achieve goals such as policy compliance and cost control.

Benchmark and improve your governance

Start identifying your organisation’s governance needs with the governance benchmark tool.

Find more cloud migration tools and recommendations in the governance section of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.

Establish good operational practices

Avoid costly business disruptions and ensure that your apps run optimally by using the methodology for management to classify your migrated workloads by criticality and business value.

Optimise your cloud costs by using tools such as Azure Advisor and Azure Cost Management.

Enable a secure and resilient platform

Help protect workloads across your hybrid environments with intelligent security services.

Simplify your data protection strategy by setting up Azure Backup.

Gain full observability of your apps, infrastructure and network with Azure Monitor.