Challenges When Migrating Apps to Azure

Migrating enterprise computing needs to an excellent cloud solution is potential enough to revolutionize every single process within an organization.

The present on-premises infrastructure deals with certain problems. This results in an extension of these applications with cloud. Moving to Azure presents an opportunity to update authentication and authorization mechanisms. This whole process alters the entire deployment. However, Moving an existing application from on-premises to Azure surely involves certain challenges, but these can be definitely overcome with simple tactics.

Below are few of such potential challenges to keep in mind while taking a step forward towards Azure migration.

Application Compatibility

It is essential to ensure that apps are compatible before forming a leap to the cloud. This can be achieved with testing.

For this purpose, an application needs to be put into an Azure test environment. This process must be carried out thoroughly since compatibility issues detected after going into production leads to serious service disruptions.

Database Migration Stories

Although migrating applications to Azure is noteworthy, moving an entire database also holds an attractive proposition and carries many benefits.

However, it also involves many incompatibilities when the source database is created with currently obsolete versions. It is highly important to predict compatibility issues between Azure, as well as the current application storage. Infidelity is possible only when applications are altered prior to moving to Azure.

Dealing With Dependencies

Applications these days rarely operate in a vacuum. While migrating an application, dependencies must be taken into regard. Determination of these dependencies often reduces major service interruptions.

Disaster Recovery Planning

Having a robust disaster recovery plan will be profitable in case any application errors occur. Oftentimes, Azure itself can be used to restore losses if employed as a backup solution.

Downtime Planning

During every migration, downtime is unavoidable, so it is best to accept and plan accordingly. Estimation of downtime and scheduling it for every step of the migration process is the recommended way.

Local Bandwidth

Bandwidth provisioning is a much more important aspect to concentrate on while using a hybrid cloud solution. In particular, local bandwidth is given utmost significance, as much of the traffic which formerly ran over high-speed LAN will eventually run over the WAN between local and remote hosted services. It is best to calculate the impact created by these bandwidth changes.

Managing Applications

Having the right methodology in place is essential to manage applications effectively.

Before deploying to a production environment within the cloud, it is necessary to ensure service level agreements and capacity planning strategy.

Fortunately, the Azure SDK provides an API, with which it is easy to execute monitoring rules and make plans without any inconvenience.

Mental Paradigm Shift

The key challenge is due to the misunderstanding that occurs among apps hosted on the cloud and conventional, local deployments. There are various concepts that are undefined to the cloud as these managements are conceptualized differently. The bottom line is one must have sufficient knowledge on administering the migration needs and understanding the attributes unique to Azure and the mental shift as a whole.

Security Issues

Information security is of high concern as well. To overcome this issue, it is recommended to use safe protocols at each level of the application. But, however, for a higher level of security, it is advisable to create and implement a virtual private network involving end-to-end encryption.

Virtual Machines

Azure is an amazing cloud solution for virtual machine hosting and holds a high compatibility with most of the VM versions. However, it is necessary to have a prudent idea regarding compatibility for each VM that is up for migration.

Final Thoughts…

Ignoring migration planning leads to severe disaster. By dedicating resources to the Azure migration process, the enterprise ensures a greater level of security, carries zero downtime, no data loss, and the maximum percentage of cut costs.