With the pandemic mostly behind us, several large economies have opened in some shape or form. This, despite the uneven supply of goods and services and higher than usual energy costs. The higher energy cost and the resulting increase in the cost of doing business, has led to a tighter economic outlook. Coupled with long lead times for required parts and continued remote work, datacenter management is harder and costlier than it has been. However, maintaining and growing any business requires additional information technology (IT) resources. Thus, there is an increased need for IT solutions to maintain business continuity and sustain innovation. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft’s Azure fill this need and are less affected by these constraints due to the economies of scale. Further, the cloud consumption model allows customers to quickly scale resources up or down to support agile businesses. This is why public cloud spend continues to accelerate and the top cloud initiatives for all organizations are migrating more loads, optimizing existing use, and modernizing through platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS)¹.

Customer requirements

The customer requirement is to stay competitive, both on the technical and business fronts, to ensure continued success. Technical competency requires an agile and innovative IT platform with data analytics to provide insights that can help differentiate from the competition. It would be ideal if such an innovative platform is available at a lower cost. Incidentally, modernizing existing IT infrastructure, applications, and data to PaaS/SaaS models in the cloud, delivers on all these requirements, leading to a higher return on investment (ROI) for the customer.

The higher efficiency and lower cost due to the adoption of modern cloud-native architectures, such as PaaS and SaaS, also leads to greater levels of flexibility. Thus, setting the stage for the customer to realize greater value as they progress from IaaS to PaaS and onto SaaS models. Please download our analyst report for details on options and value due to application modernization in Azure.

Microsoft’s commitment to modernization

This week at Microsoft Inspire, we are highlighting our commitment to modernization with integrated, at-scale modernization of ASP.NET applications to Azure Application Service. Also, in preview is Azure Migrate’s support of discovery and assessment of SQL Server running in Microsoft Hyper-V and Physical environments and IaaS services of other public clouds. Please see our tech community blog for more details on this, and other Azure Migrate features available for Linux and Windows workloads.

Enabling deeper integration with our ISV partners

Azure Migrate’s extensible framework is ideal for deeper integration of first-party features to drive automation, while also leveraging third-party tools. Here is a brief view of partner capabilities that can be added to this flexible framework:

• Over the years, enterprises have built and expanded custom applications, which require modernization to better support fast-changing business needs. See how Microsoft and CAST partner by combining Azure Migrate and software intelligence produced by CAST technology to automate migration and modernization under the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP).
• Operability of your cloud infrastructure and workloads is key to cloud adoption success and Azure landing zones provide prescriptive guidance to set a well architected foundation for your Azure infrastructure. In partnership with HashiCorp and our Terraform Azure community, we now have the reference implementation for deploying and managing Azure resources at enterprise scale.

Learn more

Attend this Microsoft Inspire on-demand session to learn more about cloud migration and modernization. Check out this FastTrack link for moving to Azure efficiently and get best practice guidance from the Azure migration and modernization center (AMMC). AMMP is now one comprehensive program for all migration and modernization needs of our customers. Learn more and join AMMP today.

Sources: 

1. Trends in Cloud Computing: 2022 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera.com.