With more and more companies moving to the cloud, many start with an initial assessment. Assessments remain important first step for customers seeking to evaluate existing infrastructure, various workloads for cloud suitability/opportunity and estimated costs. To assist customers with this difficult task, Microsoft, via it's Cloud Economics Program, offers 4 types of engagements funded in whole or in part by Microsoft. The goal of these offers to is to demystify the cloud opportunity, provide cost visibility and surface ROI opportunities.
The four Cloud Economic offers are as follows:
- Azure Migration Engagement
- Azure Economic Assessment
- Modern Workplace Engagement
- Contract Review Engagement
For the purpose of this blog, and given InCycle's Azure expertise, we will focus on the Azure Migration and Azure Economic Assessment engagements (#1 & #2 above).
What is the Azure Migration Engagement?
The Azure Migration Engagement delivers an in-depth identification and analysis of a specific workload or application for migration to Azure complete with architecture design and migration plan.
Common Deliverables include:
- Executive summary
- Data analysis
- Azure service and design recommendations
- Azure costs estimates
- Migration plan
- Professional services proposal/SOW to support migration
Examples of common workloads include line-of-business apps (often targeted for modernization initiatives), disaster recovery or database migrations.
What is the Azure Economic Assessment?
The Azure Economic Assessment is a broad review of the customer’s data center environment providing cloud readiness, prioritization of workloads for migration to Azure, and cost estimates.
Common Deliverables include:
- Executive Summary
- Cloud Readiness Analysis
- Prioritized workloads
- Azure costs estimates
- Professional services proposal/SOW to support migration (scope TBD)
This type of engagement commonly leverages 1 or more analysis tools (e.g., Movere, Turbonomics etc.) to gather broad based data and perform a data center analysis. Only at InCycle --- it doesn't necessarily stop there! Depending on the customers ultimate goal, we customize engagements (think depth and breadth of analysis) to best align with customer business drivers and objectives. Leveraging our own proprietary analysis platform (i.e., Elevate), we work with customers to identify the best cloud strategy and path forward.
