Simple steps to start your migration today.

This checklist walks you through the steps to plan, assess and begin your cloud migration, and offers resources to help you move to the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

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Strengthen security and save

End of support for 2008 servers is here. Prioritize migration of workloads running on SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 to Azure and get Extended Security Updates at no additional cost to you.

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Migrate to Azure

Get more tips that can help simplify your path to the cloud

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This checklist walks you through the steps to plan, assess and begin your cloud migration, and offers resources to help you move to the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

Identify and involve stakeholders

Contact key people throughout your business, including both IT and business stakeholders. Early engagement and support will lead to a smoother, faster migration process.

Create a strategic plan

Establish objectives and priorities for cloud migration. Plan around major business events and identify quick wins, such as moving applications with just a few dependencies to expedite your migration.

Calculate total cost of ownership

Create a personalized business case for migration by using Microsoft’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator to plan for costs and estimate your potential savings.

Discover and assess on-premise applications

Before migrating, inventory all on-premises servers, and assess dependencies.

Get support for your implementation

Many businesses opt for outside help to support their cloud migration. To move to Azure quickly and confidently with personalized assistance, consider an expert Managed Service Provider or FastTrack for Azure.

Build your team's skills

A solid training foundation is important for successful organizational change.

Know your migration options

There are several different migration strategies including re-hosting, refactoring and rearchitecting. To start, try re-hosting, often referred to as “lift-and-shift” migration. This approach lets you migrate applications as they are, without the risk or expense of code changes.

Pilot your migration with a few workloads

Prove success in your migration journey by assessing and migrating low complexity workloads as a pilot.

  • Assess workloads and then perform a test migration.
  • Perform a pilot by migrating databases from on-premises to Azure

Migrate your remaining workloads to Azure

With a successful pilot, you will be ready to migrate at scale. Use learnings and tools from the pilot to complete your workload migration to Azure.

Decommission existing on-premises infrastructure

After a successful migration and verification, determine the decommissioning process for your on-premises systems. The goal is to reduce your IT overhead and time spent managing outdated infrastructure.

Optimize, secure and manage your migrated workloads

After migration, continue to optimize usage and savings. Learn about Plow Networks’s security and optimization best practices.

Make the move to Microsoft Azure

Migrating to Azure gives you the freedom to build, manage and deploy applications on a massive global network – all while using your business’s favorite tools and frameworks.

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Innovation

Focus on business innovation with fully managed Azure services and tools to modernize your applications.

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Cost savings

AWS is five times more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server.

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Security and compliance

Strengthen your security posture with the most compliance certifications of any cloud service provider.

Let's discuss your cloud migration project and get the most out of Azure.