Accelerating customer success with Azure migration

This blog post was co-authored by Jeremy Winter, Partner Director and Tanuj Bansal, Senior Director for Microsoft Azure.

At last year's Microsoft Ignite 2018, we shared best practices on how to move to the cloud and why Azure is the best destination for all your apps, data, and infrastructure. Since then, we’re happy to share that a number of customers have joined us on Azure—H&R Block, Albertsons, Devon Energy, and Carlsberg Group, just to name a few. Azure has helped these customers drive innovation, enhance their security posture, and reduce costs with unique offers such as Azure Hybrid Benefit.

At this week’s Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, we shared the approach these customers took and more news in Azure migration sessions and one-on-one architecture review sessions with Azure engineers.

In this blog, we want to share some of the exciting news we shared at Microsoft Ignite.

Accelerating customer success: Azure Migration Program (AMP)

Since its launch in July, AMP has seen an enthusiastic reception with more than a thousand customers entering the program for migration projects ranging across Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux workloads. To recap, AMP offers customers:

• Technical skill building with foundational, workload, migration, and role-specific courses to build Azure skills for long-term success to enable organizational readiness.
• Curated, step-by-step guidance from Microsoft experts and specialized migration partners based on our Cloud Adoption Framework methodology.
• Free Azure migration tools including Azure Migrate to assess and migrate workloads, and Azure Cost Management to optimize cloud costs.
• Unique offers to reduce migration costs, including Azure Hybrid Benefit and free Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

“We are on a multi-year transformation journey, and cloud migration is an important first step. Azure Migration Program offered the right mix of training, best practice guidance, tooling, and specialized partners to best meet our needs. Importantly, Microsoft was prepared to work hand in hand with us and showed deep commitment to our success.”

– Marc Gunter, Vice President of Infrastructure, Planning and Engineering, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, CIBC

AMP engagements begin by asking and addressing questions on organizational leadership rather than around technology or product. For example:

• Have you identified an executive sponsor?
• Have you identified your business, application, and IT team participants?
• Have you developed a business case with an initial assessment of your on-premises estate and a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis?
• Have you identified a partner to help you with migration?

Ultimately, the answers to these questions form the basis of a robust migration plan. To help accelerate this step, customers can now use the new self-serve tool, Strategic Migration Assessment & Readiness Tool (SMART). More details are available in this whitepaper.

Check out this video to learn more about Azure Migration Program and apply today. Get prescriptive self-serve guidance at Azure migration center.

New Azure Migrate capabilities–your hub for all things migration

In parallel with our Azure Migration Program efforts, we’ve continued investing in product innovation to improve the migration experience for customers. Azure Migrate is a one-stop hub for all your migration needs across applications, infrastructure, and data; delivering a simplified, end-to-end migration experience, with a choice of Microsoft and partner tools.

Building on our July release, we're excited to announce support for new migration scenarios and several new capabilities described below.

Application migration

Many of you run .NET web applications on-premises that address internal line-of-business and customer-facing scenarios. Based on your feedback, we have streamlined and automated the Azure migration journey for these applications. Azure Migrate now integrates with App Service Migration Assistant to provide a comprehensive experience for migrating .NET applications to Azure App Service. 
  

New Infrastructure Migration for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

Your organization may require a virtualized desktop experience for reasons like meeting compliance regulations, securing access to sensitive data, and managing access to corporate data and apps for a mobile workforce. Windows Virtual Desktop provides the best-virtualized Office and Windows experience on Azure. We have integrated with Lakeside, a Microsoft partner, to enable assessment of on-premises virtual desktops for migration to Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) on Azure.

New Server Assessment and Migration Capabilities

Since our acquisition of Movere, we have been hard at work integrating its capabilities into our toolsets. We're pleased to announce that this work is now complete—customers can now consume Movere’s innovative discovery and assessment capabilities from Azure Migrate.

We're also announcing discovery of on-premises physical servers, in addition to the existing VMware, and Hyper-V support.

Server Assessment now also provides application discovery capabilities, giving you visibility into the applications installed, their roles, features, and versions enabled on your on-premises virtual machines, which will help you identify the right migration path for each underlying workload. Application discovery is now available for VMware virtual machines.

Many of you have been using the dependency visualization capability to identify all the components that make up your application along with their interdependencies. We have now enabled agentless dependency visualization for VMware virtual machines, currently in preview.

Agentless server migration for VMware virtual machines has also graduated from preview to general availability. 

We have significantly streamlined the process of uploading configuration and performance data of your on-premises servers into Azure Migrate. Now, you can simply use CSV import-based discovery to upload virtual machine configuration and performance details in CSV format. Once the server inventory is uploaded, you can then create assessments on the imported data without having to do appliance-based discovery.

Get started with Azure Migrate, learn more from our documentation, and try our preview features. Visit our UserVoice forum if you would like to provide feedback or learn more about our roadmap.

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