Cloud Adoption Framework: how to migrate to the cloud

Prefer to read our insights? Here’s the full transcript of our video:  

Sam: Hello again everyone and thanks for joining us on our Azure 101 mini-series. In our last video, we were beginning to look at the Cloud Adoption Framework and considered the Strategy phase.  

In today’s session, we’re looking at Planning in a bit more detail.   

So, Gina did you want to kick us off this time by taking us through the Planning phase of CAF?  

Gina: Yep, thanks Sam. This stage is great for an organisation as it will add context to the migration. The organisation will get to assess their digital estate and plan what they are migrating and most importantly how they are migrating. 

To do this, they will create a clear inventory of current assets and understand what they are migrating before it happens. 

This is often the first way savings are recognised because you will avoid migrating unnecessary assets and adding costs to your subscription.   

The great news here is that you can use a tool from Microsoft called Azure Migrate.  

This is an agent that sits on your server, whether on-premises, in another datacentre, or with another cloud provider. 

If we take a quick look at the Microsoft Learn details here for a second, we can see that the agent requires specific Windows versions to run the appliance as well as specific RAM, CPU and disks.  

However, don’t panic if you don’t have the latest Windows version for example. This tool can also be used more widely for a Hyper V host which is running Windows server 2022 / 2019 or 2016. 

So, Sam, what should organisations look to include when evaluating their current workloads?

Sam: Great question, Gina. There are several points an organisation will consider, such as:  

• What do the workloads currently do?  

• Are they still needed?  

• What hardware is being used, and how much does everything cost, including engineer time and electricity costs?  

• What SLA’s do they have and is the workload a priority to the organisation?  

If you’re anything like me, you may be asking, why do I need to know all of this? For example, why consider electricity costs?  

That’s because understanding and planning your migration to Azure involves assessing all the costs. 

If your current server costs are £20,000, but Azure costs would be £30,000 to achieve the same result, migration wouldn’t be your first option.   

However, if we now said the server is £20,000, the electricity for the year is £10,000 and the extra hardware needed for things like back up and DR are £25,000. Suddenly, Azure looks more exciting to reduce not just your costs, but also your management overhead as well. 

The good news is that Microsoft provide you with 2 other great and free tools for you to compare your on-premises spend and then to cost your Azure resources. These are the Total cost of Ownership calculator and the Pricing calculator.  

If you want to see more detail on this there is a separate video that we have recorded to show and explain these 2 portals for you. Check back in next week to learn more. 

Gina: Thanks Sam, worth checking out that video for a closer look on these tools.   

So, now you understand your workloads and the costs and size of the assets, you can then plan the migration.   

You’ll need to rationalise your workloads to help make the decisions on what will happen to them by identifying the top five workloads and their dependencies.   

Sam: That’s right Gina, however, as there are 5 types of rationalisation you can do, CAF once again helps you here by suggesting you also initially filter the types of rationalisation you do, which is known as incremental rationalisation.   

For example, instead of asking, ‘should this workload be rehosted, replaced, rearchitected, rebuilt or refactored’, we just say, ‘is this workload for rehosting or replacement?’    

Gina: Yeah, that’s a great approach because it prevents wasting time on workloads that won't be migrated to the cloud or need rearchitecting or refactoring the code.   

However, the thing to remember here is you can do more rationalising later in the process to validate decisions or learn from learnt lessons. This is actually covered in the documentation, so if you are at this stage, do go and check it out. 

Sam: Yeah, I agree, the documentation is a really good tool at this stage to make sense of the process and has helped us many times as we support Azure clients.   

As mentioned before, because you are filtering your decisions, you will likely find that the workloads you don’t need are the first to be dropped, and as such, the first cost benefits of cloud migration that are recognised after migration. 

So, that’s it for this video where we explored the Plan phase of the Cloud Adoption Framework. 

We have now seen how the Strategy provides the why for cloud, the Plan provides the what of adopting Azure. It also provides each arm of your organisation the opportunity to understand their role and impact with each cloud deployment.

Next time, we will look at Azure landing zones, which are the bedrock of the ready phase of CAF. So, until next time it’s goodbye from us.