3 Important Steps to Master Your Azure Data Migration

This guide walks you through the essential steps of preparing your data for an Azure migration.

In brief:

• Comprehensively assess your data before migrating to create a tailored migration strategy that may include hybrid solutions.
• You need to prioritize data classification and security based on industry-specific regulations (like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR) with appropriate security measures implemented for different sensitivity levels.
• Complete data cleansing and validation before migration and ensure compatibility with Azure to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Use Microsoft’s migration tools, such as Azure Migrate, Data Migration Assistant, and Azure Site Recovery, to streamline the process and maintain business continuity.
• Run a pilot program with a small dataset to assess functionality, performance and potential issues before fully migrating to Azure.

Almost 38 percent of organizations use Microsoft Azure for cloud services, making it one of the three most popular cloud providers. If you’re an information technology (IT) leader looking to migrate your organization to Microsoft Azure Cloud, you must have a comprehensive plan to ensure a seamless transition and maintain business continuity.

Cloud migration involves moving assets from on-premises infrastructure or another cloud environment to another cloud provider — in this case, Microsoft Azure.

According to cloud senior architect Chris Thompson, “One of the benefits of cloud is that you build and pay only for what you use. In the old world, you’d have to set up racks for a data center, with all the costs of cables, power, air conditioning and more. All of that is virtualized in the cloud.”

But despite the benefits the cloud offers, it’s normal to feel slightly overwhelmed by the idea of cloud migration. You may have concerns about data security, business continuity, and compliance.

In this guide, you’ll learn the essential steps of preparing data for Azure migration so you can avoid common pitfalls while future-proofing your organization for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.

Understand Your Data Before Migration

You’re not alone if you’ve put off a cloud migration for several years. As Thompson says, “Cloud strategy still feels like an afterthought for a lot of organizations.”

Before embarking on a major move — whether it’s rehosting, reforming, refactoring, or rebuilding — it’s important to understand the current state of your data and infrastructure. Let’s review how to fully understand your data before you migrate to Azure.

Conduct a Comprehensive Data Assessment

First, identify your organization’s different data types, such as structured and semistructured. Take inventory of whether your current data is stored in on-premises physical environments, like file servers, or existing cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. You must understand how your data flows between systems and identify any interconnected paths and migration points that might need extra sensitivity.

Here’s what this looks like in real life. For an executive search platform, Centric Consulting conducted a three-week investigation into data readiness, compliance, storage, network topography, and more.

Centric’s team conducted a comprehensive data assessment with the goals of relocating data to other countries, combining on-premises and SaaS into a single instance, and continuing strong business recovery and disaster response systems.

This type of thorough cloud migration assessment helped the organization find a unique solution to lower costs and support a hybrid cloud architecture. They preserved some of their on-premises systems while using new SaaS applications in Microsoft Azure.

Identify Data Sensitivity Levels

If your business handles customer financial data, healthcare records, legal contracts, or proprietary and confidential information, it’s essential to classify all the different levels of sensitive data.

For example, a healthcare organization has massive amounts of protected health information (PHI) that requires extra layers of security, like strong encryption, role-based access controls, and audit logs to comply with HIPAA.

For financial companies, bank account details, transaction records, and credit card numbers qualify as personally identifiable information (PII) and must comply with PCI DSS standards. That means new cloud infrastructure must have tools like end-to-end data encryption, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and tokenization.

Depending on your organization’s industry, note any specific regulations your new data infrastructure will need to comply with.

Determine Data Usage Patterns

When considering a migration, you want to understand usage patterns to better decide where and how to move your data. Consider access frequency, performance requirements, and business-critical data priorities. Some systems might be more sensitive than others.

For example, real-time financial records might be accessed consistently throughout the day, while historical data might only be accessed monthly. For a retail company, point-of-sale systems might need 24/7 support, while marketing applications could theoretically go down for 15 minutes overnight.

Now that you understand your data infrastructure, sensitivity levels, and usage, it’s time to take the proper steps to prepare for the actual Azure migration.

3 Steps to Prepare Your Data for Azure Migration

Before you move all your data to a brand-new environment, it’s important to follow data preparation and hygiene best practices. You must ensure data is clean and consistent for a smoother migration and better long-term performance.

Here’s how to prepare your data before you migrate to Azure.

1. Clean and Validate Data

Data cleansing involves revising, rectifying, and organizing information for standardization and consistency. AI is an incredible help in expediting and streamlining this process.

Start by removing duplicates, locating missing data, addressing outliers, and validating data that is accurate and not corrupted. This helps improve data accuracy, enhance operational efficiency, and even boost cost savings by eliminating storage for irrelevant data.

2. Assess Data Compatibility

Next, assess your data compatibility to ensure all your applications and services are compatible with Microsoft Azure. Run computing and networking compatibility checks and validate security configurations to help data and applications move over more successfully.

Also, you’ll want to make sure formats are compatible and consistent, so consider converting files for optimized storage and searching. Moving databases will be a major lift for your IT team, so validate structures, procedures, triggers and other systems beforehand. If you stay in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, use Azure Database Migration Service to keep databases in sync.

3. Implement Security Measures

You must maintain and improve security during your migration. Before moving any initial data, perform extensive backups and recovery planning, just in case something goes awry.

For data in transit and at rest, make sure you’re using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to protect data moving across networks fully. Also, you must be prepared to immediately set up access controls, multifactor authentication, and detailed audit logs to ensure continued compliance.

Now that your data is properly prepped for migration, here are the different tools and strategies to make your Microsoft Azure cloud migration successful.

Tools and Strategies for Successfully Migrating to Azure

Along with strong executive buy-in, a comprehensive migration plan, and clearly defined goals, you’ll want a handful of tools and strategies to ensure a successful Azure cloud migration. Having data analysts or IT admins read through formal Azure migration documentation is also helpful.

“If you’re already in Azure and using Azure virtual desktops, you have a solid backbone already in place,” says Thompson. “However, in addition to its documentation, Azure offers many tools that are extremely helpful.”

Microsoft Azure Migration Tools

Microsoft offers multiple tools to make migrating seamless and easy.

• The Azure Migrate service is a free platform that helps discover and assess on-premises resources. It allows businesses to track and manage cloud migration processes within a centralized dashboard to map the environment and create a plan.
• The Data Migration Assistant (DMA) also helps businesses upgrade to a modern data platform by proactively detecting compatibility issues within servers and instances.
• Azure Site Recovery helps keep your business online by replicating an Azure virtual machine to reduce infrastructure costs and minimize downtime with dependable recovery.

Testing and Validation Procedures

Once you’re ready to actually migrate, try a pilot program to move a small set of data to Azure to assess functionality, potential impact, and any performance issues. Thoroughly testing performance establishes baselines and defines key metrics to monitor throughout the process.

Next, verify data integrity to ensure any migrated data is complete and accurate — this gives your system long-term integrity.

Migration Monitoring and Optimization

Migration is not a one-and-done process, and close progress tracking and performance monitoring help quickly identify potential issues or errors. Before you migrate to Azure, make sure you have documented issue resolution procedures, disaster recovery plans, and backup solutions.

Work With an Expert for Your Microsoft Azure Cloud Migration

Over 90 percent of companies are using cloud computing technology, and for good reason. As technology becomes more scalable and complex, legacy infrastructure most likely won’t be able to handle these new workloads without major performance issues. Instead of putting off a cloud migration for another year, prepare and assess your data for cleanup and movement.

With the right preparation, your cloud migration will be smoother and more successful, and it will cause minimal business downtime. A successful cloud migration’s benefits include a more data-driven business strategy and accessible, secure files and tools that help inform decision-making. Cost savings and improved future-proofing for new technologies will make your cloud migration project pay off for years to come.

Begin your data assessment today to successfully migrate to Azure, and work with an expert provider like Centric to maximize cloud migration’s benefits. Let’s talk