Azure Cloud Migration Trends for 2023 

In 2020, the global pandemic ignited a wave of cloud migration for mission-critical workloads as businesses worldwide urgently adapted to remote working. However, a few years down the line and cloud strategies are beginning to mature into migration and modernisation efforts. Today, migration is far more proactive and forms a key part of business strategy rather than just being a reactive solution. The fact is that cloud migration coupled with modernisation is a key stepping stone to digital transformation and has the power to drive significant business growth. 

In 2023, as uncertain economic times continue, enterprises will look to migration and modernisation to support growth, future-proof their operations and reduce costs. As we move through the year, organisations will consider their cloud adoption plans holistically across their entire IT infrastructure to prepare for an uncertain future. 

The Continued Rise of Cloud Adoption

As we’ve touched on, over the past few years, businesses have dealt with unprecedented change from economic, political and societal challenges. However, while the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t causing the same business threat, the outlook remains uncertain regarding inflation, supply chain disruptions and rising energy prices. In order to combat these pressures, organisations need to be able to get more value for money. With Microsoft championing the concept of doing more with less with Azure, the cloud looks set to increase further in popularity. Azure offers less complexity and cost and couples that with more agility, resilience and innovation. It enables businesses to apply digital capabilities to extend what they can already achieve, even amidst today’s constant challenges and constraints.

By moving workloads to the cloud, organisations can align their IT investments with their business goals and benefit from economies of scale. Moreover, modern cloud-based infrastructures free up internal resources and enable employees to focus on the workloads that are most meaningful to both customers and business growth. As a result, the vast majority of organisations now have a migration and modernisation strategy in place, motivated by the desire to reduce costs, future-proof business strategy and drive revenue growth. 

The Combination of Migration and Modernisation 

Migrating a legacy system involves taking old infrastructure and transferring it to the cloud. In doing so, cloud migration delivers benefits, not least due to increased security, availability and performance. However, just migrating to the cloud alone doesn’t deliver huge efficiencies as further growth is still limited. Ultimately, to be practical and cost-effective in the long run, migration needs to be coupled with modernisation. After all, the real benefit of the cloud comes from improving efficiencies, gaining actionable insights and maximising the value of business assets. 

The coming year will see a continued rise in migration and modernisation strategies as businesses hope to improve their operations and give their technology solutions a much-needed boost. Most companies will look to either retire and rebuild in the cloud, modernise during migration or will plan to modernise later. Some of the key benefits of this strategy include the following: 

• Scalability – increase or decrease capacity quickly and simply and only pay for the services that are actually needed.
• Security and compliance – benefit from advanced security measures and ensure the business remains compliant.
• Business continuity – improve collaboration, reduce downtime and ensure all data is automatically backed up.

What’s more, companies that already have modernisation and migration strategies will move more rapidly toward cloud-only strategies in 2023. Over the next 12 months, we will see huge growth in this area as more and more businesses have all of their workloads in the public cloud. 

The Prioritisation of New Workloads

Understandably, the first workloads to be migrated to the cloud were mission-critical, including networking, IT security, email, collaboration and productivity. However, organisations that have already migrated these workloads are now looking further afield. 

Businesses worldwide are planning to migrate a diverse set of workloads over the coming year as their cloud strategies mature. These workloads include the likes of advanced analytics, server virtualisation, systems management and orchestration, virtual desktop infrastructure, mobility management, CRM sales and marketing, enterprise resource planning and SAP workloads. 2023 will see more plans to expand migration into secondary and advanced workloads led by artificial intelligence and machine learning, virtualisation and systems management. 

How Azure Supports Efficient Migration and Modernisation

Microsoft has been on its own digital transformation journey since it migrated its on-premises workloads to the cloud back in 2014. Over the past nine years, it has transformed its offering using built-in tools and data insights from Azure, optimised costs and reinvested in further modernisation to drive business growth. As a company that has over 95 percent of its own workloads running on the cloud, you couldn’t be in safer hands when looking for a cloud platform. 

With the Azure cloud computing platform, you have the choice of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) capabilities for analytics, computing, storage, networking and more. Whether you want to supplement or replace your on-premise servers, it delivers the ideal solution. Azure developers can design applications and systems using cloud-based tools and frameworks and leverage Azure’s speed, flexibility, performance and reliability. If your business is considering how to meet the challenges of digital transformation, Azure will help you to optimise operations and resources, connect clients and employees and transform and drive business processes, all in a cost-efficient and scalable way. What’s more, Azure’s architecture has been designed to support sophisticated and demanding workloads. By using Azure, you’ll be in the best position to leverage the benefits of advanced technologies such as big data, IoT, machine learning and artificial intelligence, with new services being constantly added to create an increasingly rich platform. Ultimately, Microsoft is committed to helping developers and their customers to be successful, drive strong business outcomes and get the most out of their cloud investments, even in the most challenging of environments.