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4 Steps to Accelerate Your Azure Deployment: Fast Track

If you’ve made up your mind to move IT workloads to Microsoft Azure Public Cloud, you probably want to find the quickest path to speed the transition along and ensure that the deployment is configured properly from the get-go.

There are good reasons for that. Data, documents, and apps in the cloud can be accessed 24×7 on any internet-connected device. With Azure (and most other cloud platforms), storage and bandwidth are pay-as-you-go, and it’s somebody else’s responsibility to design, build, and manage data centers. There’s a bundle to be saved there for a lot of companies, especially midsized enterprises that have made large investments in Microsoft technologies.

Speed is another of the core attractions of the Azure cloud because operations can be standardized and you don’t have to buy and install hardware. In theory, transitioning to Azure is a speedy process. In reality, making the transition to Azure can be long and tedious if you don’t think everything through.


For more information, download our Microsoft Azure infosheet.

MICROSOFT AZURE DOWNLOAD


 4 must-haves to accelerate your transition to Azure

To speed up your move to Azure, consider four fundamentals:

  • Strategic approach. All the moving parts of storage, computing, networking, and applications have to be thought out well in advance in a holistic manner. You need to understand the broad potential of Azure and how varying workloads will perform, and you must assess your architecture needs, draw up specifications, and create documentation for your migration process. All this adds up to creating a cloud-strategy roadmap that anticipates potential problems to prevent delays.
  • Effective design. Taking a strategic approach lays the groundwork for optimizing your system design. You need to be vigilant about user access support and authorization and you need to have operations in place to provide  24×7 alerts, monitoring and reporting with mechanisms to quickly escalate when problems arise. In addition, just because you are moving workloads into Azure, the security design still has to be front-and-center in every component or you risk exposing both your Azure cloud and your traditional infrastructure.
  • Comprehensive support. You don’t just set it and forget it with Azure. You need training, documentation, help files, and more in place when you make the transition, and your support programs need to be built for the long run.
  • Proven expertise. No matter how well you do on the first three requirements, there are a lot of variables in play and taking on the burden of risk on your own may not be the best option. If you want a rapid cloud deployment, you need people who have the skill sets and experience in working with Azure to ensure you get off the ground with the right configuration for your unique needs.

Getting the fundamentals right is a huge help, but you also need to make sure you’re making the right calls for your business.Azure strategy should mirror your business strategy

Midsize enterprises often have legacy technologies that do a specific job really well and do not need to be replaced. The challenge is finding a place for them in your cloud program. If you haven’t done this before, it can slow things to a crawl.

An Azure cloud deployment gives you the opportunity to standardize and centralize a host of key IT operations in a fraction of the time it would take to set up on your own and typically at a greatly reduced cost. It’s usually a great fit for testing, development, production, backup, and disaster recovery, for instance.

Yet making all this happen correctly and in a time sensitive manner is a major challenge for most enterprises. Your IT staff is likely overburdened, and pressuring them to do a hurry-up job on a cloud deployment invites costly errors.

A better option: Talk to OnX about our new Azure Fast Track Program. We’ve helped many companies make the Azure transition and have the track record to move up your Azure timeline and ensure a smooth transition.

Request to talk to an OnX Representative about Azure Fast Track Program.