What is your technical landscape and how do you operate it? Which parts are you looking to migrate to Azure? Some of these areas may not be relevant to you – we’ll skip them where that is the case.

The bottlenecks you tend to experience in the cloud are usually different from what you experience on-premise. Generally, you have a more controlled “performance envelope” that you have to fit within. Excessive I/O can be a problem as can relying on persistent, local file storage and using excessive memory.

There are ways to mitigate all of these, but in order to do so we usually have to measure and test. We often have a feasibility stage where we try to measure certain aspects of your system and run tests in Azure to establish the best solution for your unique situation. Sometimes we will also work with you to track the source of the issue in code and change the code, if required.

Based on everything we have learnt in the preceding steps, we will develop a phased plan with you. This will often entail moving to Virtual Machines in the first instance to “get you to the Cloud”, with subsequent phases moving you more and more to “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) services, which will save you further costs and increase your scalability, resilience and flexibility.

NewOrbit will help you to implement the phased plan, being there every step of the way to ensure it all goes smoothly.

• We will set up the Azure environment for you, using our extensive experience of selecting the most appropriate tools for your situation.
• We will work with your technical team to migrate the code and systems.
• We will help you set up new monitoring tools.
• We will enable new security features for you.

We will provide you with a series of options for how you can reduce your cost, similar to the following.

Note: This is just an example – the list is usually a lot longer.

NewOrbit can help you implement some or all of the suggestions:

• We can help to make the configuration changes in Azure.
• We can work with your development team to investigate further what code changes may be required to implement other changes.
• We can help design the architecture you need to make better of use of cloud capabilities to reduce cost and increase scalability.

As you start to deploy systems to Azure, we are there to help you operate and evolve them, through our Azure support and access to our Azure experts. We have a team of highly experienced Azure architects as well as specialists in a wide range of Azure technologies. You have access to those as you need them and they can help you grow and evolve your system.

We offer a range of support plans to our Azure customers, from a responsive plan where we will respond to tickets raised by you, all the way up to plans where we actively monitor your application’s performance and respond to security alerts. For some of our clients, we are engaged to proactively monitor and raise potential performance or security matters with their solutions, make recommendations and, often, help to implement ongoing improvements.

We have a comprehensive Partner Support Contract with Microsoft, which allows us to escalate support tickets from our customers to priority support from Microsoft, as well as enabling us to engage Microsoft experts on proof-of-concepts and similar, with our customers.