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

It is clear that digital transformation is changing the way we live and work. To establish a more robust, secure, and stable foundation for transformation, forward-thinking organizations are accelerating their investment in hybrid and multicloud technologies. These environments can fuel innovation by providing freedom of choice, greater scalability, and peace of mind that regulatory and data sovereignty requirements are being met. Microsoft Azure provides several technologies that help organizations to take full advantage of cloud modernization during and after the migration process.

Migrating to IaaS platform

Legacy enterprise infrastructures usually include a sprawl of resources spread across multiple datacenters and edge locations. Migrating an infrastructure begins with identifying the workloads the company wants to move to the cloud. Some workloads can run immediately on Azure without modification; other workloads might require further analysis and planning. The fastest path to migrate to the cloud is migrating or rehosting the current on-premises workload to an IaaS platform. The applications will have almost the same composition as before but are deployed to virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. This enables companies to quickly provision new applications and increases the reliability of their underlying infrastructure.

Migrating workloads with Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is a centralized hub to discover, assess, and migrate on-premises servers, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. It follows three broad steps: discover, migrate and optimize to assist with cloud modernization. It is an end-to-end solution that includes a proven framework and tools to help organizations migrate their first workload.  It also provides a complete roadmap for discovery, migration, and continual optimization, including insights and strategies for running an entire datacenter portfolio on Azure.

Adopting a hybrid and multicloud strategy

Azure Arc delivers a consistent platform for simplifying the security, governance, and management of multicloud, on-premises, and edge environments. The key benefits of using Azure Arc to modernize infrastructure management:

• Streamline security
• Establish central visibility
• Meet governance, compliance, and organizational standards
• Centrally manage and delegate access and security policies
• Easily enroll in additional Azure services
• Organize and inventory assets

With Azure Arc-enabled servers, organizations can manage Windows and Linux physical servers and VMs hosted outside of Azure, on their corporate network or other cloud provider. When a hybrid machine is connected to Azure, it can benefit from standard Azure constructs, such as Azure Policy and applying tags.

By modernizing workloads with Microsoft Azure, you get flexibility and scalability: you can migrate some workloads to the cloud while keeping others in their current physical environment. You can optimize costs because you pay only for the cloud resources you need instead of maintaining seldom-used IT assets. Microsoft provides you enhanced security and compliance through built-in features, specialized tools, and simplified management and monitoring from a single screen with central management tools like Azure Arc.

Softline is a Certified Azure Expert MSP Partner offering services such as Datacenter Assessment & Migration, Application & Data Modernization as well as Cloud Governance Services. Contact us for counseling and our experts find you the best path to modernize your infrastructure.

The Microsoft ebook called Drive Innovation and Business Value Through Cloud Modernization can be downloaded after registration here.