- Up next: if you're looking
to significantly reduce your research time
to weigh up your options in Azure,
I'm joined again by Azure expert Matt McSpirit
to show you new free assessment tools.
In fact, we'll go deeper
on the new Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator
that gives you tailored recommendations based on
your starting point, including tools that you can use
to build your business case
and get broader stakeholder support.
So, Matt, it's really great to have you back on,
you know, as we head into the new year, to share some
of the more pragmatic guidance with another amazing topic.
- Yeah, thanks, always a pleasure to be back.
- Now, in the past, we've extensively covered various tips
for the economics of shifting to the cloud
or making the right architectural choices.
That said, we've had several requests from you, the viewers,
looking for guidance prior to taking those steps
that can give you a clearer path forward,
which is why we wanted to look
at the new assessment tools today.
- Yeah, exactly.
And it's not surprising that we're seeing the requests.
Every situation's unique, and there's often a lot of room
for optimization when you start to move your services
to the cloud.
Now whatever your situation,
building solutions the right way, with the least amount
of trial and error, can be a challenge.
And what's more, with Azure, and the same is typically true
for other cloud providers, there's thousands
of services and options.
And depending on what you're building,
there might be a dozen or more viable paths
for building any particular solution.
Now, the good news is these assessments can make it easier
to find what you need to build
or host your workloads in Azure.
With the right SLAs, it may help you to assess
and close gaps on skillsets, stakeholder support,
business KPIs and budget targets.
- And this all really helps in terms
of incrementally letting you increase
your baseline knowledge as you get further
into your cloud adoption.
- Yeah, exactly right.
And what we're really doing here
is packaging up the learning we've seen
in working with organizations broadly.
And in fact, we've observed common patterns
where your adoption strategy for the business can start
to break down, and conversely, where they succeed.
And we've used these insights to inform our assessments,
which are part of our cloud adoption framework,
and they're completely free to use.
So let me show you.
First, you can get to them at aka.ms/MicrosoftAssessments
and these cover a number of areas.
First there's the Azure Well-Architected Review,
to assess things like the reliability, cost management,
operational excellence, as well as the security
and performance efficiency of your workloads.
Then there's the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator,
to look at your current strategy
and get broad recommendations as you make the case
for building cloud-based solutions.
Then there's the Cloud Journey Tracker,
to find the best cloud adoption path based on your needs;
Developer Velocity, for guidance
to boost business performance with your developers;
the Governance Benchmark, to identify gaps
in your organization's current state of governance;
and finally the Strategic Migration Assessment
and Readiness Tool, to best prepare
for large scale cloud migrations.
And these are all wizard-based experiences.
And in exchange for the responses you provide,
we'll give you tailored recommendations
to make more informed decisions.
- And this is also true by the way, whether you decide
to do it yourself or work with a partner,
but can you walk us through then an assessment
and its outcomes? - Yeah, of course.
And I'm actually going to start
with the tailored recommendations.
So, what you're seeing here is actually the resulting report
from the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator.
I've answered a few questions
and it's evaluated my organization's starting point
for cloud adoption.
It's assessed our posture across these six categories,
from how far along we are in identifying our motivations,
to organization alignment that will help
in creating our business case.
And these are all aligned with the strategy methodology
of the cloud adoption framework.
And you can see we're just starting out
in most categories and that's why we're red.
And the scores are based on the responses we gave
to the questions in each category,
and the overall score is an average
across all six categories in this case.
And as I scroll down,
you'll see top-level tool recommendations.
And these are like hidden gems that can lead
to massive cost savings and process optimizations.
And this one here on the left
for virtual machine cost estimation lets you use Power BI.
So you can easily get a high level understanding
of the cost differences
between standard pay-as-you-go pricing in Azure,
what happens when you apply your existing on-prem licenses
to cloud resources using the Azure Hybrid Benefit,
and the impacts of using reserved instances
where you can sign up to a one or three year agreement
for virtual machines, databases and platform services
to save costs.
Now in the middle, there's the Cloud Adoption Plan template.
And this helps you get started quickly
as you create your adoption plan and document your strategy
for stakeholder review.
And on the right is the pricing calculator
to help you estimate and manage costs in Azure.
And it works across Azure services,
lets you plug in specific resource attributes, for example,
with a virtual machine, things like its region,
operating system, core count and memory,
and for a detailed view
of resource costs prior to deployment.
Now back in our assessment,
below these resource recommendations,
you'll see a detailed set
of improvement recommendations specific to my organization.
And in each area, it's chosen the best actions
with links to specific guidance.
For example, under identifying my motivations,
this guide is all about how to get business
and IT stakeholders on board with cloud migration efforts.
So you can see that beyond technical guidance,
it includes broader best practice guidance
for navigating all the steps pre and post implementation.
And the same types of hyper-tailored recommendations
can be found as I expand the categories below
for expected outcomes, financial considerations,
technical considerations, organizational alignment
and skilling, as well as creating the business case.
And I can easily share my results with others too.
So I'll navigate up and hit share,
and then you'll see it lets me share in social media
and via email.
So I'm going to choose email and share it with you, Jeremy.
So you can see our initial starting point, and that's
going to send you a link directly to our assessment.
- Okay. So it looks like I've received your email.
So I'll go ahead and follow the link.
And there's the assessment that we just saw
from your browser, but it's right here now on my machine.
And a lot of these types of tools
and best practice recommendations can be really super hard
to find, but these are the things that are like the,
"I wish I knew about this before" type resources
that really save you a lot of time and also money
when you're just organically
starting to use cloud services without a plan in place.
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
And it's not just a pre-deployment checklist.
You can go through the assessments anonymously
without signing in, but when you do sign in,
you can save your assessments
and track your progress over time.
For example, here, you can see that
I've gone through two assessments.
And when I click into this one, you can see
that our organization has been iterating
and improving over time.
And we've added milestones to track our progress
as we started to build up our knowledge
and get closer to the business case.
And you can easily add milestones, either from
the assessment homepage we just saw, or if I scroll up,
I can also add on here from the assessment overview page.
Now I can choose all or a subset of the categories
to update my team's progress.
And from here I can continue, but let me just go back
to our guidance and you can see the picture is a lot greener
than we saw before.
And we're in a pretty good place to be able
to prepare our case for moving to the cloud.
- Okay, so can you walk us
through then some of the questions
in the assessment to get an idea
of how you get to the recommendations?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And there are a few ways to show you this,
but since I'm in the assessment results now,
I can show you the questions and my answers
by clicking into the answer summary.
And these are the answers I gave
in this particular milestone.
I can also choose to show all original responses
using this checkbox in the upper right.
And that shows me the original options for each question,
but let's say this is my first time
going through an assessment.
And let me show you that experience as well.
So I've navigated to aka.ms/MicrosoftAssessments
in a private browser.
And when I click into an assessment,
I can continue anonymously if I want,
but it also suggests that I sign in.
And that works with Azure Active Directory accounts
like the one you'd use to sign in with Office 365
or Microsoft Teams.
And by the way, this also works for any account type.
You don't need to be an administrator.
So I'll sign in to get the extra benefits
and track my progress.
And as you can see, first I need to choose the aspects
and categories of this assessment that I'm interested in.
And as I click on each, it shows me a preview
of the questions on the left.
So I'll go ahead and choose every category in my case.
And from there, it guides me through the assessment
until I've completed all the pages.
- And this is really great.
You know, it's awesome to see the tangible benefits
with those tailored recommendations for tools
and also for how to best approach your cloud adoption
and really inform your business case.
So what's the best way then to get started with this?
- Well, it's really easy.
So you can just go to aka.ms/MicrosoftAssessments
and choose the one you want.
Now, I recommend you start
with the Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator
that we showed today, amd you can get to that directly
by going to aka.ms/StrategyEvaluator.
- Thanks so much, Matt, for the awesome introduction
to the free new assessment tools.
Of course, keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest updates.
Subscribe if you haven't already yet.
And thank you for watching.
(upbeat electronic music)