Data#3 established a new landing zone for the organisation in a hub-and-spoke architecture. Azure Migrate was then used to migrate the 40 eligible workloads from the on-premises data centre into Azure. The servers were a mix of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016. There were SQL databases that were migrated from on-premises which was vendor-managed infrastructure.
The workloads that were unable to be migrated to Azure underwent further analysis. The optimal scenario was to house the workloads that couldn’t run in cloud would be homed in the organisation’s head office, so an Azure Stack HCI node was setup and the remaining workloads were migrated to this.
Azure Arc is used to manage the Azure Stack HCI environment as the control plane for the public cloud infrastructure. SCCM Managed Updates was also replaced with Azure Update Manager to assist in the management and governance of updates to all of the organisation’s machines in Azure, which includes compliance monitoring.
Remote access is now more secure through the introduction of Azure Bastion as public IP addresses are now not required for this access. The way that infrastructure was deployed has also been modernised so that agile, code-led approaches are now used.
Many of the benefits of the cloud migration are currently being realised by the advisory body, with the cost savings currently being realised. The method of management has been modernised for the staff at the body through the deployment of modern management solutions. They are also able to now use the Emissions Impact Dashboard (EID) in Azure to understand the emissions impact of using Microsoft Cloud, highlighting their direct and indirect emissions related to their cloud usage.