Last year many organizations turned to the cloud to survive disruptions caused by the pandemic. Businesses are now charting the course for their recovery and further accelerating their cloud momentum to drive faster app innovation, optimize infrastructure costs, and enhance security posture. In a recent survey, 90 percent of enterprises responded that they expect cloud usage to exceed prior plans due to COVID-19¹.

“The pandemic accelerated our timetables, but we made the right decision to move quickly and are not looking back. Our total cost of ownership (TCO) has gone down 30 percent, the disaster recovery (DR) time has gone down from 30 days to a couple of hours. We now have the scalability we need and are no longer spending money on various upgrades that were previously required. With the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, we were able to move our datacenter to Azure in six months.”—Gurmail Jaswal, Director IT Solutions, Boston Pizza

This week at Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing expanded program and product investments—to help customers accelerate their migration and modernization journey with Azure.

Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) is expanding to support new scenarios

Over the last two and a half years, Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) has helped thousands of customers unlock the benefits of the cloud, with the right mix of expert guidance and best practices at every stage of their journey. Boston Pizza, University of Leicester, British Council, Implenia, and Actavo are just a few examples.

AMMP is designed to serve the needs of our customers for migration and modernization across their entire infrastructure, application, and data estate. This is why we evolved the Azure Migration Program (AMP) to the AMMP a few months ago, expanding it to include support for application and data modernization.

Today, we are announcing support for additional scenarios in AMMP, driven by customer requests:

• Infrastructure: We are expanding AMMP to help customers plan and move their SAP environments to Azure, including both SAP lift-and-shift and SAP HANA deployments.

“We were needing to upgrade our mission-critical SAP systems that our largest business entity utilizes. On top of that, we were up against a tight deadline with our datacenter end of service. The Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) accelerated our transformation to the cloud with skilling, FastTrack for Azure engineering resources, and a specialized partner (Brillio). Together they helped ensure a smooth migration, cost reduction, and risk mitigation. With AMMP, we were able to not only beat the project deadline but quickly realize efficiencies that would have not otherwise been possible on-premises.”—Patty Ward, CIO, Mizkan Americas

• Applications: We are deepening our focus on app modernization in two areas:

Azure Red Hat OpenShift: AMMP will now help customers move their Red Hat OpenShift environments to Azure as part of their application modernization initiatives.

“Digital transformation is a key component of the modern enterprise, which can frequently mean adopting the operational and cost efficiencies of cloud services. Enabling this shift is critical for customers and a key priority for Red Hat, so we’re pleased that Azure Red Hat OpenShift will be part of the Azure Migration and Modernization Program, which is intended to help customers and partners gain faster access to the necessary tools and expertise for advancing transformation strategies, from application modernization to workload migration.”—Sathish Balakrishnan, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Experience, Red Hat

Cloud-native apps: AMMP will help customers innovate and build new cloud-native apps using common app patterns like serverless, containers, and microservices architectures.

• Hybrid and security: Customers often bring up hybrid flexibility and enhanced security posture as key requirements during their move to the cloud. AMMP will help customers with deploying Azure Arc to workloads that aren’t planned or ready to move yet, helping them consistently manage their workloads across cloud and on-premises environments. We are deepening our focus on security in AMMP with guidance and deployment assistance for services like Azure Security Center and Azure Defender.

SAP is available in AMMP as of today. Stay tuned for availability details on the others.

With these additions, AMMP is now one comprehensive program for all migration and modernization needs of our customers. Learn more and join AMMP today.

Enhanced migration and modernization tools and product capabilities

Azure Migrate is the central hub to discover, assess, right-size, and move applications, databases, and infrastructure to Azure. Azure Migrate recently announced the preview of two new features: first, Agentless discovery, and assessment of ASP.NET web apps and second, App containerization tool expansion to include Azure App Service as deployment target in addition to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Check out this Microsoft Mechanics video to learn how to easily containerize your apps and deploy them in AKS or Azure App Service.

We had previously introduced Azure Automanage, an Azure service that simplifies and optimizes the management of Windows Server and Linux virtual machines. Today we’re announcing the general availability of two key features in Azure Automanage—Extended network for Azure and SMB over QUIC—to simplify migration of Windows Server-based workloads. Learn more about the latest Azure Automanage innovations.

Azure SQL is a family of SQL cloud databases providing flexible options to migrate and modernize application databases. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing many new capabilities in Azure SQL Managed Instance: premium series hardware, Windows authentication, 16 TB storage capacity—which deliver more performance, scale, and flexibility. The new link feature within Azure SQL Managed Instance reimagines SQL Server database replication to enable mission-critical workload migration with minimal downtime. Learn more about these Azure SQL enhancements.

Azure landing zones in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure are designed to help customers successfully prepare their cloud environments for migration or modernization. To make Azure landing zones creation even easier, we built the Azure landing zone accelerator which provides an intuitive Azure portal-based deployment experience. To help customers optimize their Azure investments, we have created a new Azure Virtual Machines cost estimator which includes a Power BI template and on-premises compute unit list. This estimator is available to all customers as part of our cloud economics and Cloud Adoption Framework guidance.

Learn more about these and other best-practice guidance enhancements for your cloud journey.

Learn more

Attend my Microsoft Ignite session to learn more about cloud migration and modernization scenarios, best practices, and our latest investments. If you are looking to modernize and SaaS-enable your apps, check out this on-demand session from the FastTrack for Azure engineering team. Finally, get best practice guidance from the Azure migration and modernization center to inform your plans.

¹Source: Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report