Beyond Lift and Shift: How to Optimize an Azure Environment Post-Migration
Your business made the migration to Microsoft Azure’s cloud … now what? While the initial “lift and shift” of your existing applications and workloads may be complete, true IT transformation is ongoing. To fully harness the capabilities of the cloud, a “set it and forget it” mindset won’t cut it. Now, it’s time to look beyond the first step of moving to the cloud and start to take advantage of the tools and features from Azure that will bring your organization to the next level.
Our recent “Beyond Lift and Shift” webinar, hosted by Centrilogic Cloud Architect Shane Castle, will help you accomplish just that. In the webinar, we looked at a few of the critical areas to focus on once you’ve migrated to the cloud, and explored essential tools from Azure your business can’t ignore.
Landing Zones
With Azure, it’s important to carve out an area to provision your resources — basically setting up a secure and controlled environment that enables application migrations and greenfield development in Azure at scale. Azure landing zones leverage common sets of design areas and consider all platform resources that are required to support your entire application portfolio. Landing zones are also the foundation for securing and monitoring your cloud-based applications by providing reference implementations or approaches to help your organization make decisions in areas including:
- Governance
- Networking
- Identity and Access Management
- Resource Management
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Cost Management
Without proper budgeting, costs in the cloud can get out of hand, and accurate budgeting requires precise tracking and insight into your usage. Azure’s Cost Management tool can help. With the capability to manage across external clouds as well as on-premise data centers, this feature provides your organization full visibility into your consumption and spending on various resources. This allows you to accurately create and monitor your budget. Additional features from Azure like budget alerting, resource tagging, and cost allocation also give you increased control over your spending in real time, so you can cut costs and increase your ROI in the cloud.
Cloud Security
Cloud security is critical — and a massive topic on its own. One way to gain some important focus is by aligning to the Zero Trust model, an idea that differs from traditional security models that focus primarily on perimeter security. The Zero Trust model ensures all connections between resources are encrypted, authenticated, and audited with equal rigor, whether they’re internal or external. In short: don’t trust, always verify. We share why we at Centrilogic are proponents of Zero Trust security, and cover best practices your organization can adopt, like:
- Multi-factor authentication
- Least Privilege
- Continuous Monitoring
- Penetration Testing
Azure provides several security tools, including its cornerstone services: the Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel. These tools are essential for collecting and monitoring security information on every product in your Azure environment, so you can properly mitigate and respond to risk, as well as improve your security all around.
Lifting and shifting your business’ applications to the cloud is just the first step when it comes to making the most of your organization’s digital transformation and cloud strategy. Once you’re in Azure, it’s time to bring your business to the next level with dozens of cloud-native tools, features, and more.
Ready to get started? Download the Beyond Lift and Shift Webinar today to learn how your organization can use Azure’s tools and features to cut costs, boost your security and compliance within the cloud, and more.