Cloud Migration Services

Belitsoft is a team of Azure migration and modernization experts with a proven track record and portfolio of projects to show for it. We offer comprehensive application modernization services, which include workload analysis, compatibility checks, and the creation of a sound migration strategy. Further, we will take all the necessary steps to ensure your successful transition to Azure cloud. Planning your migration to Azure is an important process as it involves choosing whether to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild your applications. A laid-out Azure migration strategy helps put these decisions in perspective. Read on to find our step-by-step guide for the cloud migration process, plus a breakdown of key migration models. An investment in on-premises hosting and data centers can be a waste of money nowadays, because cloud technologies provide significant advantages, such as usage-based pricing and the capacity to easily scale up and down. In addition, your downtime risks will be near-zero in comparison with on-premises infrastructure. Migration to the cloud from the on-premises model requires time, so the earlier you start, the better. Dmitry Baraishuk Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft on Forbes.com Cloud Migration Process to Microsoft Azure We would like to share our recommended approach for migrating applications and workloads to Azure. It is based on Microsoft's guidelines and outlines the key steps of the Azure Migration process. 1. Strategize and plan your migration process The first thing you need to do to lay out a sound migration strategy is to identify and organize discussions among the key business stakeholders. They will need to document precise business outcomes expected from the migration process. The team is also required to understand and discover the underlying technical aspects of cloud adoption and factor them into the documented strategy. Next, you will need to come up with a strategic plan that will prioritize your goals and objectives and serve as a practical guide for cloud adoption. It begins with translating strategy into more tangible aspects like choosing which applications and workloads have higher priority for migration. You move on deeper into business and technical elements and document them into a plan used to forecast, budget, and implement your Azure migration strategy. In the end, you'll be able to calculate your total cost of ownership with Azure’s TCO calculator which is a handy tool for planning your savings and expenses for your migration project. 2. Evaluate workloads and prepare for migration After creating the migration plan you will need to assess your environment and categorize all of your servers, virtual machines, and application dependencies. You will need to look at such key components of your infrastructure as: Virtual Networks: Analyze your existing workloads for performance, security, and stability and make sure you match these metrics with equivalent resources in Azure cloud. This way you can have the same experience as with the on-premise data center. Evaluate whether you will need to run your own DNS via Active Directory and which parts of your application will require subnets. Storage Capacity: Select the right Azure storage services to support the required number of operations per second for virtual machines with intensive I/O workloads. You can prioritize usage based on the nature of the data and how often users access it. Rarely accessed (cold data) could be placed in slow storage solutions. Computing resources: Analyze how you can win by migrating to flexible Azure Virtual Machines. With Azure, you are no longer limited by your physical server’s capabilities and can dynamically scale your applications along with shifting performance requirements. Azure Autoscale service allows you to automatically distribute resources based on metrics and keeps you from wasting money on redundant computing power. To make life easier, Azure has created tools to streamline the assessment process: Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s current recommended solution and is an end-to-end tool that you can use to assess and migrate servers, virtual machines, infrastructure, applications, and data to Azure. It can be a bit overwhelming and requires you to transfer your data to Azure’s servers. Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit can be a lighter solution for people who are just at the start of their cloud migration journey. It needs to be installed and stores data on-premise but is much simpler and gives a great picture of server compatibility with Azure and the required Azure VM sizes. Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment tool Is another great tool that guides the user all the way through the assessment with a series of questions. Besides the questions, it also provides additional information with regard to the question. In the end, it gives you a checklist for moving to the cloud. Create your migration landing zone. As a final step, before you move on to the migration process you need to prepare your Azure environment by creating a landing zone. A landing zone is a collection of cloud services used for hosting, operating, and governing workloads migrated to the cloud. Think of it as a blueprint for your future cloud setup which you can further scale to your requirements. 3. Migrate your applications to Azure Cloud First of all, you can simply replace some of your applications with SaaS products hosted by Azure. For instance, you can move your email and communication-related workloads to Office 365 (Microsoft 365). Document management solutions can be replaced with Sharepoint. Finally, messaging, voice, and video-shared communications can step over to Microsoft Teams. For other workloads that are irreplaceable and need to be moved to the cloud, we recommend an iterative approach. Luckily, we can take advantage of Azure hybrid cloud solutions so there’s no need for a rapid transition to the cloud. Here are some tips for migrating to Azure: Start with a proof of concept: Choose a few applications that would be easiest to migrate, then conduct data migration testing on your migration plan and document your progress. Identifying any potential issues at an early stage is critical, as it allows you to fine-tune your strategy before proceeding. Collect insights and apply them when you move on to more complex workloads. Top choices for the first move include basic web apps and portals. Advance with more challenging workloads: Use the insights from the previous step to migrate workloads with a high business impact. These are often apps that record business transactions with high processing rates. They also include strongly regulated workloads. Approach most difficult applications last: These are high-value asset applications that support all business operations. They are usually not easily replaced or modernized, so they require a special approach, or in most cases - complete redesign and development. 4. Optimize performance in Azure Сloud After you have successfully migrated your solutions to Azure, the next step is to look for ways to optimize their performance in the cloud. This includes revisions of the app’s design, tweaking chosen Azure services, configuring infrastructure, and managing subscription costs. This step also includes possible modifications when after you’ve rehosted your application, you decide to refactor and make it more compatible with the cloud. You may even want to completely rearchitect the solution with Azure cloud services. Besides this, some vital optimizations include: Monitoring resource usage and performance with tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Traffic Manager and providing an appropriate response to critical issues. Data protection using measures such as disaster recovery, encryption, and data back-ups. Maintaining high security standards by applying centralized security policies, eliminating exposure to threats with antivirus and malware protection, and responding to attacks using event management. Azure migration strategies The strategies for migrating to the Azure cloud depend on how much you are willing to modernize your applications. You can choose to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild apps based on your business needs and goals. 1. Rehost (Lift & Shift) — Fast, No‑Code Cloud Move Rehosting means moving applications from on-premise to the cloud without any code or architecture design changes. This type of migration fits apps that need to be quickly moved to the cloud, as well as legacy software that supports key business operations. Choose this method if you don’t have much time to modernize your workload and plan on making the big changes after moving to the cloud. Advantages: Speedy migration with no risk of bugs and breakdown issues. Disadvantages: This approach may limit performance, scalability, and automation until further modernization. 2. Refactor — Minor Updates to Leverage Azure Services Refactoring involves making small changes to the application to improve its cloud compatibility. This can be done if you want to avoid maintenance challenges and would like to take advantage of services like Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure App Service, or Azure Kubernetes Service. Advantages: Compared to a complete architectural redesign, this method is much faster and easier, improving cloud application performance and allowing the use of advanced DevOps automation tools. Disadvantages: Less efficient than moving to improved design patterns like the transition to microservices from monolith architecture. 3. Rearchitect — Modularize for Cloud‑Native Scale Some legacy software may not be compatible with the Azure cloud environment. In this case, the application needs a complete redesign to a cloud-native architecture. This often entails migrating to microservices from the monolith and moving relational and nonrelational databases to a managed cloud storage solution. Advantages: High performance, scalability, and flexibility are delivered to applications through Azure's cloud capabilities. Disadvantages: Migrating may be tricky and pose challenges, including issues in the early stages like breakdowns and service disruptions. 4. Rebuild — Full Cloud-Native Replacement The rebuild strategy takes things even further and involves taking apart the old application and developing a new one from scratch using Azure Platform as a service (PaaS) services. It allows taking advantage of cloud-native technologies like Azure Containers, Functions and Logic Apps to create the application layer and Azure SQL Database for the data tier. A cloud-native approach gives you complete freedom to use Azure’s extensive catalog of products to optimize your application’s performance. Advantages: This fully redesigned, cloud-native app enables business innovation through the use of AI, blockchain, and IoT technologies. Disadvantages: Features and functionality may be more limited in a fully cloud-native approach than in a custom-built application. Compare Azure Migration Strategies: Rehost vs Refactor vs Rearchitect vs Rebuild Choosing the right Azure migration strategy depends on how much you want to modernize your existing applications. This side-by-side comparison outlines the effort, timeline, risk, and best-fit scenarios for each approach, including lift-and-shift, replatforming, and full modernization. Strategy Effort Time Risk Best for Rehost (Lift and Shift) Low: No code or architecture changes Fast: Quickest way to move to Azure Low: Minimal risk, but limited cloud optimization Legacy apps needing fast migration without refactoring Refactor (Replatform) Medium: Minor code updates for cloud compatibility Moderate: Slight dev effort required Medium: Code changes pose some risk Apps requiring minor code changes to use managed services/features Rearchitect High: Significant structural changes required Long: Due to architectural complexity High: Greater risk from deep changes Apps needing modernization, microservices, cloud-native features Rebuild Very high: Complete rewrite using Azure PaaS tools Longest: Full redevelopment effort High: High complexity and risk Legacy systems that no longer meet business needs; full modernization Each modernization approach has pros and cons as well as different costs, risks and time frames. That is the essence of the risk-return principle, and you have to balance between less effort and risks but more value and outputs. The challenge is that as a business owner, especially without tech expertise, you don't know how to modernize legacy applications. Who's creating a modernization plan? Who's executing this plan? How do you find staff with the necessary experience or choose the right external partner? How much does legacy software modernization cost? Conducting business and technical audits helps you find your modernization path. Dmitry Baraishuk Chief Innovation Officer at Belitsoft on Forbes.com Professional support for your Azure migration Every migration process is unique and requires a personal approach. It is never a one-way street and there are a lot of nuances and challenges on the path to cloud adoption. Often, having an experienced migration partner can seriously simplify and accelerate your Azure cloud migration journey. Our Azure developers help you overcome cloud migration challenges through tailored planning, modernization expertise, and hands-on delivery. Let’s simplify your transition secure, efficient, and aligned with your business goals.

When to use IaaS? Companies that face the following challenges are the prime candidates for IaaS adoption: Your current infrastructure doesn’t support your fast business growth. You can't upgrade your on-premise infrastructure as often as needed. You buy costly infrastructure but never use it at its full capacity. Your infrastructure constraints limit your apps' performance. Your on-premise storage resources are constantly overwhelmed. Unpredictable user traffic spikes constantly lead your apps to crash. Your on-premise applications have slow response times. Advantages of IaaS IaaS allows us to eliminate infrastructure management burdens, increases operational agility, and offers greater scalability for our apps.  Reduced capital expenditures With an on-premise setup, the company manages its own data centers. They must acquire servers, storage, and development software and set up their own networking. Besides that, data centers must invest in physical spaces with special power and cooling systems. They need IT experts to purchase, manage, and upgrade all the equipment and licenses. Procurement processes can take months.  IaaS is more economical because resources are provided on demand. You only pay for the computing, storage, and networking services you have consumed. IaaS maintenance expenses are much more predictable and easily budgeted. Each resource is offered as a separate service which you can add to your system as needed. IaaS providers offer price calculators and cost management tools to make administering your expenses a seamless process. The main disadvantage of IaaS here is that you still have to purchase, install, configure, and manage operating systems, middleware, and applications. Increasing Application Availability  Businesses often need to scale their application up or down according to changing demands. For instance, eCommerce companies experience seasonal traffic spikes, especially during the holidays. IaaS servers allow them to overcome these challenges with infrastructure provided on a pay-as-you-go basis. With cloud computing services offering almost unlimited resources, companies can easily meet all their business, legal, and compliance needs. IaaS providers have advanced content delivery networks with data centers distributed across the globe. You can choose to scale your application in areas that are closer to the customer. This way you increase performance while reducing network latency. Ultimately, you can create a setup that reaches all your customers geographically. With traditional on-premise infrastructure, it's a hard task to achieve. Improving disaster recovery, reliability, and business continuity With IaaS, there's no need for heavy infrastructure maintenance and troubleshooting hardware issues. Cloud service providers ensure %99.9 availability of their servers with service-level agreements (SLAs). Workloads can be spread between multiple servers and data centers, so even if one of your components fails, another one will take over. IaaS servers are equipped with fault-tolerance mechanisms that establish high reliability for your solutions. You can easily set up data back-ups and sync them automatically. With these tools in place, you can save costs and forge robust business continuity processes. Innovate and bring new app features to users faster Upgrading your current solution or launching a new product is much easier with IaaS as you can instantly create a dedicated environment for development, testing, and delivery. Infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks, so you can be more focused on business innovation. IaaS Use Cases Initially, companies used IaaS mostly for temporary purposes. Today we see startups, enterprises, and state organizations use IaaS for the development and hosting of customer-facing web apps, data warehousing, and analytics solutions, as well as for data storage, backup, and recovery tasks. IaaS supports internal applications such as ERP, supply chain, or finance.  There are different scenarios when you would apply IaaS infrastructure. The Least Expensive Method of  Migrating to the Cloud Moving your existing software from on-premise to IaaS is the fastest way to cloud adoption:   it’s the fastest and least expensive method of migrating; you lower your expenses by eliminating costs associated with on-premise maintenance; you don’t need to completely refactor your application while taking advantage of the enhanced performance and security.   Quickly Scalable Development and Testing Environments Development and testing in production are tightly associated with the risk of system crashing that can result in damage to a company's reputation and financial losses. So development and testing environments are crucial. However, it’s again about infrastructure issues for you and your DevOps teams.  With IaaS, you can easily set up and discard development and quality assurance environments, continuously delivering updates to your applications at lower costs.  The environments can be instantly scaled up or down within a few clicks so you can test new ideas, and deliver the new version of your app to market faster.  Web Applications Hosting  Web application hosting is a traditional low-cost way of using IaaS. It can be used for information websites, complex data delivery web systems, and mobile app backends.  High-performance computing (HPC IaaS solutions) Complex predictions and modeling (like simulating all aspects of vehicle engineering; risk modeling in financial services; insights in genomics, precision medicine, and clinical trials) require high-performance computing solutions.  With IaaS infrastructure you can simply scale your resources upward and pay for the amount you use. It's a much more cost-efficient way compared to traditional hardware upgrades to sustain such computational tasks.  Quickly Scalable Storage and Computing Power for Big Data Analytics Searching for relationships and patterns within a mountain of information requires enormous, backend processing power to analyze the high volume of data and get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. With IaaS, data can be stored in large volumes and processed. Simplifying Planning and Management of Backup and Recovery systems Traditional storage management is complex, costly due to capital outlay, and requires specially trained personnel to meet legal and compliance regulations. IaaS provides data backup and recovery features that outperform traditional methods.  For example, the cloud provides off-site locations in the event of a primary data center disaster.  How does Infrastructure as a Service work? Infrastructure resources in IaaS are provided via virtualization. The cloud computing platform provides you with choices for different types of infrastructure and configuration. After you've made your choice, the system creates digital environments called virtual machines with their own CPUs, memory, network interface, and storage. Virtualized resources function in the same way as physical hardware, so on a business level, everything works the same as with on-premise servers. However, you get the advantages that come with using IaaS infrastructure. Cloud providers offer additional services such as load balancing, security, clustering, monitoring, and storage resiliency. Businesses are able to create policies to automate crucial infrastructure tasks and configurations across multiple applications which lead to advanced system orchestration. For instance, companies can establish load-balancing policies to sustain optimal application availability and performance as well as configure automatic backups.   Ultimately, IaaS allows you to create an infrastructure with performance monitoring with minimal intervention from your team. Types of IaaS Services IaaS provides compute services, storage services, and networking services. Compute Resources IaaS compute resources include central processing units (CPUs), graphical processing units (GPUs), and internal memory (RAM).  Typically a virtual machine packages together CPUs, internal memory, and storage. IaaS users select virtual machine packages that fit their business needs.   Compute services come paired with additional services like load balancing and autoscale to make sure businesses make the most of their infrastructure capabilities. Storage Resources IaaS providers offer three types of data storage resources: object storage (the most common mode of storage in the cloud), file storage, and block storage (more complex to scale). Hierarchical file storage provides a centralized way to store files within a rigid directory/subdirectory/folder structure and works well with easily organized amounts of structured data. However, the file retrieval process can become time-consuming, as the number of files grows. Block storage stores data in blocks like an SSD or hard drive and is ideal for containers. Such type of data storage offers faster performance than file storage because it breaks a file into blocks of data and stores each block separately under a unique address. It takes less time to access a file by pulling the blocks back together, than navigating through directories and file hierarchies.  Object storage stores data as objects similar to those in object-oriented programming. It’s a preferred method for backing-up unstructured media and web content like emails, videos, image files, and web pages, as well as sensor data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s also ideal for archiving large volumes of pharmaceutical data or music, image, and video files - data that does not change frequently. Cloud-native applications are built today using cloud-based object storage as a persistent data store.  Networking Resources IaaS physical infrastructure also comprises networking devices such as routers, switches, and load balancers that are available through APIs.  As with computing and storage resources, IaaS platforms virtualize the functionality of this hardware to provide cloud networking services on-demand. Use cases include the building of multi-zone regions and virtual private clouds. IaaS vs Bare Metal Cloud  You can achieve an even lower level of control over cloud infrastructure than traditional IaaS with bare-metal-as-a-service (BMaaS) sometimes also called dedicated servers.  This type of cloud service does not virtualize the computing, storage, and network resources, but instead provides direct access to the provider's infrastructure. It enables almost complete control of the underlying hardware without sharing its resources with any other cloud service customers. Without virtualization, BMaaS also offers higher performance which is beneficial for complex computing tasks. Additionally, companies who are familiar with operating traditional on-premise servers will feel very comfortable with orchestrating BMaaS-hosted applications. At the same time, BMaaS does not carry the scalability benefits of traditional SaaS where you can easily provide more resources in case of usage spikes and balance the load across different servers. The choice between BMaaS and IaaS depends on the requirements of a specific business case. BMaaS generally works great for high-performance computing, GPU computing, big data, analytics, and other tasks with high resource consumption rates. IaaS Security Security and compliance responsibilities are shared under the IaaS model with the appropriate service agreement. In most cases, the level of security attained in a cloud environment bests any on-premise setup. IaaS providers guarantee that the infrastructure they provide as a service is completely secure. For that they oversee security measures taken at every level: Physical security is ensured by monitoring the premises of data centers via advanced surveillance systems making use of security cameras, video recording, motion sensors, and sentries. Infrastructure security (compute, storage, patching, and the physical network) is attained with restricted access, monitoring, and regular maintenance. Data security is achieved with strong encryption, back-ups, and regular third-party audits for compliance with protection regulations. As a user of IaaS, you are responsible for securing your data, applications, virtual network controls, operating system, and user access.  IaaS providers offer sophisticated tools to monitor your app's security and respond to potential threats. And that is provided out-of-the-box, without the need to bear the expenses to develop and set up your own tools.  Cloud providers stay on top of the latest security standards and upgrade their services to better protect their infrastructure from outside and internal threats. However, each service provider has its own approach to protecting its customers. So make sure you carefully evaluate their offerings. IaaS Pricing In Iaas you are usually charged for the consumed amount of resources. However, cloud providers have come to introduce a variety of pricing models to accommodate various businesses: Subscriptions and reserved instances. Often cloud providers offer discounts to users who are ready to sign up for a longer subscription period, usually 1-3 years. Monthly billing. Monthly billing is traditional for Bare Metal as-a-Service (BMaaS) provision where the infrastructure is meant to support applications that don't experience user traffic and consumption spikes. By the hour/second. It's a very popular pricing model used for traditional cloud infrastructure. Transient/spot. Some providers offer temporary usage of freed-up resources which can be reclaimed by their original users when needed. Take advantage of IaaS cloud infrastructure Transitioning to a cloud setup is a process that requires both business strategy and technical expertise. Our team of experienced engineers and cloud developers can assist you in migration and help choose the right cloud delivery model. 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