Since October 2022 Softline has been operating under the brand name Noventiq.

Migration and modernization to Azure gains the resiliency and innovation needed to accelerate organizations today. By moving to Azure, organizations pay less for best-in-class, highly resilient infrastructure at global scale. Azure helps to focus on modernizing application portfolio with highly productive, fully managed services, while provides organizations hybrid flexibility, and protect their most valuable assets with trusted cloud security every step of the way.

Key challenges

Migrating apps as-is to the cloud helps flip capital expense (CAPEX) to operational expense (OPEX) and quickly gain agility and scale. However, while this is often the starting point for the cloud journey, it’s rarely the end. The first step in deciding how the organization’s cloud journey will continue is to understand the key challenges and desired outcomes, as those can help shape the migration and modernization strategy.

• Enabling remote work

With the global workforce working from home, cloud productivity tools such as Microsoft Teams and Azure Virtual Desktop are indispensable to collaboration and operations.

• Cost optimization and Cash flow challenges, CAPEX to OPEX

The ability of cloud to flip CAPEX to OPEX continues to be a key cost optimization strategy for many organizations.

• Application innovation and Rapidly scale web apps and infrastructure

The cloud enableds rapid experimentation at low cost, and put profitable services into production faster than ever.

• Faster time to market

For companies highly scalable cloud infrastructure helps to meet the surge demand from online consumers.

• Cybersecurity threats

Remote working enlarges the risk of data loss and cyberattacks but cloud providers can deliver in-depth, multi-layered security that protects data even outside of traditional network boundaries.

• Budget and resource constraints

The flexible nature of the cloud enables organizations to scale up and down, while built-in resilience and redundancy ensures that systems are available to serve customers, manage data, and empower employees.

The next step is to plan the organization’s journey using a clear, yet flexible, framework. Cloud migration and modernization involves significant organizational change management spanning people, process, and technology. Taking a holistic approach helps to navigate the journey successfully, also ensures that the organization realizes new benefits— including cost optimization, productivity, agility, and scale.

The three aspects to begin a cloud journey: planning, implementation, and operations.

Planning for cloud migration and modernization

• Define your strategy

Define and document your motivations, involve and align key stakeholders, and engage a cloud migration and modernization partner.

• Plan for your move

Discover and assess your apps, databases, and infrastructure, make a business case for migration and modernization, and build a holistic plan.

Driving effective implementation of cloud strategy

• Get ready for the move

Get your IT and app development teams up to speed on cloud technologies, migration tools, and operational processes with upfront training investments, then set up landing zones for your workloads, and review best practices for Azure readiness.

• Migrate your workloads

Make cloud migration easier with centralized tools, then assess, migrate, optimize, and promote workloads iteratively, and prepare to expand your scope with cloud migration best practices.

• Modernize your apps and data

Modernize iteratively at any stage, refactor apps and databases for speed and productivity, rearchitect apps and databases for cloud scalability and productivity, and rebuild with cloud-native technologies to accelerate developer velocity.

Governing, managing and securing your cloud environments

• Govern and secure your workloads

Quickly detect and respond to threats across hybrid environments with intelligent threat protection from a solution like the Azure Security Center, and establish and maintain the right mix of standard and custom policies to govern your cloud subscriptions and resources compliantly.

• Manage and cost-optimize your cloud environments

Become familiar with the tools, offers, and guidance from your cloud provider, and Manage your workloads across all environments with a solution like Azure Arc. Monitor workload performance with real-time insights and trends. Help ensure your workloads stay protected with cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Each migration and modernization journey is unique and depends on your workload complexity and business priorities. Softline can help you to simplify your journey.  Our certified architects have 10+ years real life experience in planning, deploying and optimizing Azure Infrastructure. We provide various managed services based on your requirements, and we follow vendor-approved methodologies like Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. Our Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization confirms Softline's extensive expertise and success in migrating client solutions. Contact us and ask for an appointment with one of our cloud migration experts.

The Cloud migration and modernization with Microsoft Azure ebook can be download from here.