Azure migration center
Let’s go forward, together. Get resources at every stage of your cloud migration, including tools and guidance to help you move, manage, and secure all your workloads.
Find out how ready you are to start migrating the SMART way
From business planning to training to security and governance, find out what you need to do to prepare for your Microsoft Azure migration with SMART—the Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool.
Start assessmentPrepare for tomorrow’s challenges today
Migrating to the cloud isn’t just about improving scalability and security. It’s also about improving your financial resilience by shifting from a traditional upfront expenditure to a more flexible pay-as-you-go model.
Hear Jeremy Winter, Director of Azure Management, share his top three recommendations to help accelerate your cloud migration journey to Azure.
For detailed guidance on migration, check out these how-to videos.
Spend less money and time managing your datacenter
And, grow your business by spending more time on higher impact work.
Up to
80%
Savings on Windows Server with Azure Hybrid Benefit and Reserved Instances1
$10M
Avoided on-premises infrastructure and staff costs2
478%
3-year return on investment2
Up to
93%
More energy efficient than traditional enterprise datacenters3
Why migrate to Azure?
Migrate to the cloud securely and efficiently—on your own terms.
Optimize costs and migrate data with confidence
Save money with the most cost-effective offers for Windows Server and SQL Server. AWS is 5 times more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server. Become energy efficient and sustainable by moving on-premises datacenters to cloud.
Confidently migrate your data and workloads to Azure with best practices, expert guidance, and cost optimization tools.
Stay secure and resilient across hybrid environments
Protect workloads across your hybrid environments with intelligent security services backed by 3,500 cybersecurity professionals.
Use built-in resilience to avoid costly business interruptions.
Scale your applications and workloads on demand
Increase agility with best-in-class Azure infrastructure that scales to your business needs.
Reduce operational burden with fully managed application and database services in Azure.
"We determined Azure SQL Database Managed Instance was the best choice for us in terms of scalability, cost, and performance.… We've seen a 49 percent cost reduction and 25 to 30 percent performance gains."
Nipun Sharma, Analytics Architect, Business Technology and Systems | Komatsu Australia
"One of our big objectives was to eliminate $3 million in capital costs over about three years, and to reduce our operating costs by approximately the same amount. At the same time, we wanted to improve our quality of service. With Azure, we're confident that we'll meet those goals."
Jim Slattery, Chief Financial Officer | Capstone Mining
"With the move to Azure, the hospital cut its data backup costs by half. We were able to save almost 50 percent by hosting our disaster recovery environment for Epic and other critical systems in Azure…. It's very low cost. Even more remarkable, the project teams built the cloud infrastructure in just three months."
Daniel Breton, Infrastructure Manager | The Ottawa Hospital
"Our move to .NET Core, Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, and Azure services worked out just like we had planned. Our new website makes us much more agile in supporting Chipotle's primary mission: bringing people responsibly sourced, classically cooked, real food, with wholesome ingredients."
Mike Smith, Lead Software Developer | Chipotle Mexican Grill
"We have been successfully transitioning from on-premises to the cloud. [Platform as a service (PaaS)] is always our first choice. We can focus on the solution, not the infrastructure."
Tom Craig, Senior Cloud Engineer, Digital Customer Experience (DCX) | Premera Blue Cross
"The biggest difference this year was ease of scalability. Last year we depended on adding physical hardware way ahead of the event, adding cost and complexity. This year, we saw more than 500 views a second and delivered 21 TB of data to our customers, with great response times. Using Azure, we were easily able to scale on demand to get the performance we needed."
Thomas Wilhelmsen, Head of IT Operations | Komplett
Migrate any kind of mission-critical workload to Azure
Servers
Easily move on-premises Windows and Linux distributions to Azure. Extend your VMware environments to Azure with Azure VMware Solution.
Courses
Documentation
Virtual desktops
Simplify virtual desktops management on Azure with Windows Virtual Desktop. Run multisession Windows 10, optimize Office 365 ProPlus, and get support for remote data service environments.
Web apps
Spend more time creating value for your customers and less time managing infrastructure by moving your .NET and PHP web apps to Azure App Service.
Databases
Migrate SQL Server to Azure Virtual Machines or a fully managed option like Azure SQL Database. Move MySQL and PostgreSQL to fully managed Azure services. Get minimal downtime and built-in HA, monitoring, and security.
Videos
Mainframe and midrange migration
Modernize with ease and without abandoning the applications you rely on by running your midrange and mainframe applications on Azure.
White paper
Learn more
SAP
Bring Azure intelligence, security, and reliability to SAP with a simplified migration path and learn about SAP and Microsoft’s unique partnership.
Learn more
DevTest environments
Improve software quality and reduce costs by moving DevTest environments to Azure. Quickly deploy and manage hundreds of VMs for development and testing.
Explore guidance, programs, and tools to help you succeed on Azure
Frequently asked questions
-
There are a lot of cloud migration benefits, but most organizations are motivated by one or both of the following:
- Simplify their infrastructure and data management, as well as improve costs, security, and scalability by moving existing on-premises apps to the cloud.
- Drive better business outcomes by modernizing their digital estates with increased flexibility and cloud capabilities.
-
All workload migrations to the cloud—including databases—typically follow a six-step process. Factors such as the types of workloads, the complexity of the existing digital estate, and industry or governmental compliance requirements might require special planning and tools, but the six steps are almost always the same:
- Define strategy: Define your business justification and expected outcomes.
- Plan: Align actionable adoption plans to business outcomes.
- Ready: Prepare your environment for your planned cloud adoption changes.
- Adopt: Move your workloads to the cloud environment.
- Govern: Benchmark and implement governance best practices for your environment and workloads.
- Manage: Use proven methodologies to manage your cloud and hybrid solutions.
1 Calculations based on scenarios running 744 hours/month for 12 months at 3-year Reserved Capacity. Prices as of October 24, 2018, subject to change. Savings based on eight vCore Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Business Critical in US West 2 running at Azure Hybrid Benefit rate. AWS calculations based on RDS for SQL EE for db.r4.2xlarge on US West (Oregon) in a multi AZ deployment for Reserved Instances under Standard 3-year term, all upfront payment. Actual regional pricing and program discounts may apply. Actual savings may vary based on region, instance size, and performance tier. Savings exclude Software Assurance costs, which may vary based on Volume Licensing agreement. https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/reserved-vm-instances/
2 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM Study: Microsoft Azure IaaS, commissioned by Microsoft, October 2019. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/forrester-economic-impact-azure-iaas/
3 Source: The carbon benefits of cloud computing, A study on the Microsoft Cloud in partnership with WSP. Updated 2020. https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/9/739BC4AD-A855-436E-961D-9C95EB51DAF9/Microsoft_Cloud_Carbon_Study_2018.pdf