Azure Migrate - Product & partner updates

Shiva Shastri Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure Migrate—Product & Ecosystem

The importance of an agile, secure, and innovative IT platform for the continued success of any business cannot be overstated. It is also important for such a platform to include appropriate tools at a competitive price. Azure offers you the required tools with cutting-edge innovation at a lower cost of ownership (TCO) so you can reap higher returns on your investments (ROI). Your workloads running in Azure will have a smaller environmental footprint and can lead to further cost savings through transitions from IaaS to PaaS and onto SaaS. Azure thus continues to be crucial to the transformation of businesses of all types and sizes and presents a compelling way to differentiate from the competition.

Microsoft’s focus on cost optimization and innovation

During Microsoft Inspire, we are highlighting our continued commitment to cost optimization while providing exceptional opportunities for higher productivity.  You can benefit from Microsoft’s deep expertise and recent developments in security and artificial intelligence (AI) by moving to Azure, and Azure Migrate can help you get there.

Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free tool for migrating to and modernizing in Azure.

It provides discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities for various workloads on your premises. All this while allowing you to run and monitor the proceedings from a single, secure portal. At Inspire, we are excited to share some of these updates:

• Savings due to security components in financial estimates through the “TCO/Business case” feature to allow you to analyze cost more comprehensively before moving to the cloud. Specifically, industry benchmarks for securing servers and databases on-premises are compared with cost savings from using Microsoft Defender for Cloud (MDC) in Azure. With just a few clicks, you get necessary visibility into the options available for workloads and their associated costs to make informed decisions. The data for financial analysis can come from an agentless appliance through the discovery process, manual input through a csv file or from Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Learn how you can generate a business case with security features.

• Tanium : We have built a solution where Tanium’s real-time operational data can be used by Azure Migrate for assessments and to generate a business case to move to Azure. This capability provides you with a near real-time view of cost in Azure, without having to install an Azure Migrate appliance on your premises. Tanium inventory and asset data can also be used to check for readiness to move to Azure and curtail cost through right-sized recommendations based on resource utilization trends. See how a Microsoft and Tanium collaboration brings value to our customers.

• Azure Migrate will now support in-place upgrade of end-of-support (EOS) Windows Server 2012 and later operating system (OS), during the move to Azure. You can elect to move applications and databases to a fully supported, compatible and secure operating system such as Windows server 2016 or 2019, in Azure. Detect and mitigate any app-compatibility risks by upgrading to a test environment in Azure without any impact on production workloads. This helps you confirm functionality before cutting-over to Azure. Thus, protecting investments in legacy applications while upgrading to a more secure platform at no additional cost. As an alternative, you may also move to the same OS in Azure with free extended security updates (ESU) until October 2026. Please see our technical blog for more details on EOS Windows Server upgrade feature. Here is a brief video highlighting an actual EOS VM migration.

Today, we are also announcing two new offerings to help you with all your cloud adoption needs from migration to innovation - Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate. Read this blog to learn more about our offerings and how you can get access to experts to help you with your cloud transformation.

Learn more

Attend the Microsoft Inspire session titled “Expand your cloud practice with a migrate to innovate strategy”, and discussions following it to learn more about these features. Learn more about Azure Migrate and get started in Azure today!!!