Microsoft Azure cloud services provide tools to protect data, applications, and infrastructure. Businesses can improve security and reduce risks by leveraging Azure Identity management, encryption, and monitoring.

Each Azure service requires planning before deployment. Many of these services share dependencies, including access to Azure Active Directory, Azure Storage, and Azure Security Controls. 

In this article, we'll discuss the importance of proper planning for Azure deployment, and the role managed service providers (MSSPs) like Hypershift play in assisting clients with their Azure migration and ongoing monitoring requirements.

What Cloud Migrations Are Supported by Azure?

When deploying applications and data within the Azure cloud, organizations must consider which platform model best meets their business needs.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) allows organizations to scale up and scale out their Azure instance to meet their changing business needs. This service helps organizations manage their computing and virtual machine resource expenses.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is part of the IaaS model, along with additional tools for database management and business analytics.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) includes IaaS and PaaS and an application in the service offering.

After organizations choose their preferred platform model, the next step is the cloud migration strategy:

• Rehosting: Rehosting leverages a direct copy of the existing application and infrastructure to the organization's new Azure instance. This method is a low-risk option for cloud migration.
• Re-architecting: This is an optimal method for cloud migration. Organizations will re-architect their applications and infrastructures to leverage cloud capabilities and functions.

How Critical is Security and Compliance within the Azure Cloud Environment?

Microsoft Azure provides tools to protect data, applications, and infrastructure. Azure security capabilities allow organizations to deploy the adaptive control needed to meet compliance and regulatory mandates.

These controls include:

• Azure Identity and Access Management support multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access control (RBAC), and least privilege assigned to individual or active directory groups.
• Azure supports data security and encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit with AES-256 encryption.
• Azure Information Protection provides email encryption.
• Azure Rights Management Systems helps organizations protect intellectual property by applying tags and document labels. This service also monitors content access and usage, looking for high-risk compromises.
• Threat Management capabilities within Azure protect cloud services and virtual machines from malware and DDoS attacks and provide data analysis tools. It also performs scheduled scans against the cloud resources to check for vulnerabilities.
• Azure Compliance provides a dashboard with real-time visibility into your compliance status against several mandates and regulations, including PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA.

What is Azure Deployment Environments?

Azure Deployment Environments (ADF) offer project-based templates for devs to deploy consistent environments at any development stage, maximizing security and cost efficiency.

• “ADF is available across Australia East, Europe West, Japan East, Canada Central, UK South, US East, US East 2, US South Central, and US West 3 East.”
• ADFs are easy to create and deploy new environments without the hassle of backend processes. Platform engineers can choose from pre-built templates and spin up self-service environments quickly, with all the configurations applied automatically.

What is Azure Kubernetes Services?

Deploying Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) applications can be complex but efficient and practical with proper planning and execution. Organizations have different deployment options regarding AKS, including:

Canary: Canary deployment in AKS allows for the slow rolling out of updates to a small group before releasing them to everyone.

Rolling Deployment: Rolling deployment updates an application to a new version without downtime by updating instances one at a time until all are on the latest version, allowing the application to run uninterrupted.

Blue/Green: Blue/green deployment maintains two identical production instances. One environment is primary, and the other is idle.

A/B: A/B deployment, or split testing, involves testing two versions of an app on a small group of users. The better-performing version is then used for everyone.

Managing the Cost of Azure Cloud

Organizations consuming Azure cloud resources must maintain cloud cost monitoring. These resource expenditures are subject to constant fluctuation, so enabling the Azure Cost Management Module is a necessary step.

Here are recommendations to help manage your cost Azure investment.

• Right-size underutilized resources were leveraging Azure Advisor.
• Change your dynamic workflow from a fixed hourly to a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
• Move reserve instances to a pay-as-you-go model instead of a one-year committed contract.
• Organizations must enable auto-scaling to help spin up and spin down resources.
• Ensure you enable the correct Azure Compute Service offering that aligns with your needs. Often, organizations spend way more on computing than what they need.

What are the Benefits for Organizations Who Migrate to Azure?

Migration to the Cloud is widespread in the IT industry because of digital transformation. Azure Cloud is a top choice for many organizations looking to migrate.

Azure is a popular cloud platform for its comprehensive services, such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Migrating to Azure requires detailed planning and a four-step approach.

Azure delivers several benefits to clients, including:

• Leveraging Azure's scale-up and out elasticity, including Azure App Services and Azure Kubernetes services, to help manage containers and resources.
• Leverage Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platforms, including Azure SQL database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Storage.
• Azure encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit leveraging Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
• Enable monitoring and logging services for all applications, databases, and virtual machines. These tools help measure performance and overall health. The data collected by Azure monitoring and application insights helps provide critical metrics, alerts and notifications, and relevant information for diagnosis.

After each migration to Azure, organizations should consider the following repeatable work to help with future projects.

Assess: Assessments are crucial in Azure migration projects. These assessments identify on-premises resources that should migrate to the cloud.

Migration: Migration involves moving workloads from on-premises to Azure after assessment and planning.

Optimize:  Validate your migration plan in a staging environment to ensure it works correctly before deploying to production. Test migrated workloads in staging first.

How Can Hypershift Assist Your Organization for an Azure Project?

Moving to Azure is a rewarding yet very complex migration. A massive advantage of Azure cloud migration is transforming the organization's critical applications and data into a more agile, optimal, and secure architecture for now and the future.

Organizations have an excellent opportunity to retire or re-engineer older applications, remove standalone security devices that serve little or no use in the cloud, and open up the ability to scale up their platforms based on need.

Legacy change control procedures and platform additions in traditional onsite data centers proved costly, disruptive, and often led to more unforeseen issues. Migrating to Azure can reduce the risk of application breaches while providing a more flexible development environment for product expansion and scaling.

Organizations are considering a move to the Azure cloud. Hypershift, an MSSP specializing in Microsoft M365, Azure, and security, is an idea consulting and managed services firm for organizations to engage to help with their Azure strategy.

Hypershift Transform

Team collaboration is critical in creating a comprehensive cloud strategy. Our consulting services provide interactive sessions to help you explore public cloud features and capabilities.

Hypershift Migrate

We help you maximize the cloud for your business success. Trust us to migrate your workloads smoothly.

Hypershift Optimize

Let Hypershift optimize your cloud environment for cost, security, and performance.

Contact us today to schedule a discussion with our Microsoft Azure architects.