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>> Welcome back to another episode of the Azure enablement show.
In today's episode, we're going to talk about
how you can prepare your Cloud migration project,
and how you can use a tool from Microsoft,
called the Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool
to be more efficient. [MUSIC]
Welcome back. My name is Thomas and I'm here with Tony,
and we're going to discuss the Microsoft Strategic
Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool
to help with your Cloud migration project.
Before we actually dive in, Tony, into the tool itself,
can you tell me a little bit why customers would want to
migrate or modernize their infrastructure and their environment?
Can you give us a couple of examples?
>> Absolutely, Thomas, and it's a great question to start with.
Increasingly, we were seeing customers talk
about migration and modernization,
both of them together.
You could see some of the reasons on the slide we're showing.
But the key thing is it has to be
the reason that's important for your organization,
and that's going to be different
based on the business that you're in.
The real classic pattern that we
see is that customers a lot of times want to start
by addressing the basic thing of cost
and getting out of the data center,
getting out of those types of operations.
Then they want to move on to,
once they've adopted the Cloud,
get new capabilities,
so things like being able to scale
up and scale down their applications.
Then the last milestone is just getting on to new innovation,
perhaps bringing new services to market
or finding insights about
their customers that they didn't know before.
That's the progression that we see,
and it's just a really exciting time for customers in this space.
>> That's awesome. Absolutely.
My next question really will be around what are
the challenges you're seeing with customers who want to
migrate or modernize their environments?
I understand that you're obviously
pretty aware of these challenges and you
created a tool to actually help those customers with that.
>> Yeah. The way we found out the customers were having
some trouble with getting ready was actually through our program.
We have this program called,
Azure Migration and Modernization Program
where we take customers through the entire journey.
That was our early indication that there
was definitely some struggles with readiness.
I think we saw three struggles.
The first is really missing the early stage stuff,
the strategy and planning,
and making sure that that's solid.
Next thing is thinking end to end about readiness,
so early on importance of the strategy plan,
how you're going to migrate and then even thinking,
what do I need to get ready post-migration,
so thinking unto end and then honestly, missing steps.
As we'll go over in a few minutes,
there's a lot of steps to
address and it's important to think about all of them.
>> That's a good point, and again,
you just mentioned there
are a couple of steps you need to think of.
How does a migration project look like?
Can you give us a little bit of an indication
and a little bit of an example on that?
>> Absolutely, and this is going to be mapped directly to what
you are going to see in the tool that we'll
give a demo on in a few minutes.
The good news is that it's all
based on the Cloud Adoption Framework,
which should be familiar to customers if they've already
been on the Azure journey with us to some extent.
This is Cloud Adoption Framework or CAF,
starts with figuring out
that strategy that I said is so important,
and what are the motivations?
Do you have funding secured and just a
loose sense of what's in scope for the project?
You'll get into more detailed scope later.
Then moving on to plan,
so assessing your environment,
figuring out exactly which applications are
going to be in scope and then what timing,
when will they move to the Cloud?
Also really important, making sure that you
have a skills readiness plan for your organization.
We'll talk about that in some more detail.
Ready is also a really important step.
This is about mostly how you're
going to set up your landing zone in Azure such
that your workloads are going to land there
in a well-architected destination.
Adopt. How are you going to exactly
orchestrate the migration or modernization,
things like automation to make things go
even faster as you get through latter stages.
Then the stripe across the bottom secure managing govern.
Now, this is what I mentioned are the steps that you
should think about even though they're post-migration.
How are you going to set up
a good backup and disaster recovery strategy
for your applications?
How are you going to ensure good governance through things
like policies and blueprints?
those are services in Azure that you can start to leverage.
Again, thinking end to end,
but these are all called out
in the tool that we'll look at in a few minutes.
We're really thinking holistically about readiness.
>> That's pretty awesome.
Again, I think that is really helpful to have all these steps,
especially from the Cloud Adoption Framework,
and take that all into considerations.
Because it's easy that people can forget
certain things to think of and with that tool,
we can really help them.
It sounds like it's a pretty smart tool.
Can you actually help us a little bit with that,
and show me a little bit about it?
>> Absolutely, Thomas.
I'd love to show you a demo here.
I'm going to start here at the Microsoft Docs page, Azure section.
If I go to the architecture tab
here and I just go into assessments,
this is where you can see that we have
a variety of them available for you.
This is the one we're going to talk about today,
Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool.
I'm going to start a new assessment.
I'm just going to give you a quick sense for
how easy this is to complete.
It should be something that the migration project
lead someone in the project management office
for the project should be able to complete,
or they should be able to reach out to some of
their teammates to understand the answers to these,
and it's not too overbearing.
Just questions like, have you
identified the compelling business reason?
One of those reasons from the slide we showed earlier.
I'll just give a few more examples.
Do you have executive sign-off and funding?
We'll pick an answer here.
As you could see, we're going after
yes/no type of responses or maybe just three choices.
Another one is, do you have
a partner identified that's going to help you?
Again, you should be able to complete
this in just a matter of a few minutes.
I want to now hop to a finished example of the assessment.
You could see here that we have
a number of different scores shown.
An overall score is yellow, so moderate.
We got a score five out of 10
and that's an average across all the dimensions,
and you could see here that in the earlier stages,
things like the business strategy or partner support were green.
But in some of the middle of the project stages,
such as doing a business case or developing the plan,
we're yellow and maybe we're red and fewer the latter stages.
This is totally normal and expected.
In fact, it would be a little
strange if you are green across the board.
The expectation is that we're identifying where you need to
work on and just surfacing how you can make these even better.
We don't just give you the scores.
We're going to give you ways to improve.
You can go down here to the recommendation section,
and I'll give you a few examples.
Let's just start with discovery and assessment.
We're a lot of times pointing you directly to Microsoft Docs.
These are articles that you can just reference directly,
and we're just cherry-picking those ones for you
that are going to help with making this screen.
Here's an example. You can head to
this article about how to identify your migration scope,
and then we also have another great resource for you on
how to work on getting application owners aligned,
to having their applications move to Azure.
Another really practical example
is building your technical skilling plan.
In this case again, we're yellow, but that's okay.
We're going to give you the resources
that it takes to make this better.
We're pointing you to the free training
that's out at Microsoft Learn,
and a really great starting point
is also the Azure fundamentals course.
Of course, you'll probably want to get
a lot of your staff certified on Azure.
We have a whole plethora of certifications,
and so you can explore those.
The idea here is that we're
surfacing what you can take action on and you can
hand off these recommendations to the teams
who's going to be able to do something about this.
>> Now, this is pretty smart and very
impressive I think to have all this information.
What I think is very important is,
when you think about migration,
you often think just about technology,
about how do I do actually the migration?
But there's obviously, as you just showed,
a lot more involved from business strategy and then also skilling
wise and the tool obviously takes care of all of that.
You also show me scores.
My question now would be,
do I need to have a high score to actually then start my project?
>> That's a great question, and it's
a natural inclination for all of us to want to score highly
on anything that we take.
As I said, the answer is no.
Like it's expected that you would start
this process with perhaps a red or a yellow score.
The idea is that, we're going to not
just tell you that you're scoring yellow,
but we're going to give you an action plan for how to improve it.
What are the specific areas that you need to go work
on in order to get that green?
Another thing to call out is that,
it's not expected that you have to be green
when you start the project,
but as you get closer to
moving through these phases of the project,
they should be turning green.
While you don't have to have
everything at the last mile steps figured out,
by the time you get to the middle of the project,
you should be figuring out,
for example, how are you going to do management and
governance for the new Azure workloads.
>> That's great. You also showed me before that
there are recommendations and they looked pretty good.
Can you tell me a little bit more how we
could take these recommendations and what to do with it?
>> Sure. We make it really easy
across all the Microsoft assessments.
You could just simply copy the URL and send it to your team,
in which case they would have
access to the report that I just showed,
and they can interact with the tool and all the recommendations.
Then in the upper right-hand corner of the tool,
we also have a number of share options,
so you can e-mail the report and they can also get it that way.
>> That's awesome. Again, it looks like
the Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool is
really great and helps customers to really identify
where they need to invest and think
about in their migration project.
If I now want to learn more, where do I go?
>> Sure. We make it pretty easy.
The first thing you should do is go to the tool
itself and that is at aka.ms/smarttool.
The next thing is, if you want to learn more about
the topic of migration or modernization,
we have a great resource for you called,
the Azure Migration and Modernization Center.
You can just go to your favorite search engine and
search for that or go to Azure.com and it'll be there.
The last thing is,
we have a program for you.
When you're ready to get started with help from Microsoft,
we would love to engage with you.
It's called the Azure Migration and Modernization Program,
also available at Azure.com/AMMP.
>> That is awesome. Thank you very much, Tony,
and thank you very much to everyone watching,
and don't forget to go to aka.ms/adopt.
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