4. Cloud migration: Planning, implementation, and best practices

Customers are accelerating their cloud journey to optimize costs, enhance security and resiliency, and scale on demand. One of the key motivations for organizations to migrate to Azure is to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their IT infrastructure. By migrating to Azure, organizations can move from a capital expenditure (CapEx) model with fixed upfront commitments to a more flexible and scalable operational expenditure (OpEx) model. With the OpEx model, organizations reduce spending by only paying for resources and services that they consume.

As we will discuss in this chapter, this is only one of many benefits that you will gain by migrating to Azure. First, we'll see that Microsoft provides a framework that will guide you in architecting for reliability, security, and high availability. We will then explore the underlying infrastructure of Azure to help you make the most informed choice to...