best solution is to migrate users to Office 365 if you need offsite capabilities. This
type of migration will likely be a major undertaking, and you will run in a hybrid
mode during the migration.
Other applications will need to use a combination of technologies. If the
application uses a SQL database, use SQL replication to replicate the database. Use
filesystem replication to replicate other filesystem assets.
For replication of anything running in an operating system that is not covered by
an application-aware solution, you can look at the replication provided by Azure
Site Recovery that was previously mentioned.
To ensure mobility between on-premise infrastructure and Microsoft Azure, make
sure that for those workloads that need to be transportable, you use only features
common to both environments, such as the following:
Generation 1 virtual machines
VHD disk format of 1023GB maximum size
No requirement on IPv6 communicationsThere is also an interesting licensing consideration for placing workloads in Microsoft
Azure. Your organization may already have a large number of Windows Server
licenses, but they are not required when using Microsoft Azure because the Windows
Server license is included. It may be possible to repurpose licenses for other on-
premises workloads. Your organization may have multiyear agreements for licenses,
in which case you may be able to negotiate converting elements of the agreement to
cloud-based services.
Ultimately, the public cloud offers many capabilities. Your organization should look at
each one and decide whether it is a good fit for some workloads. Then your
organization should deploy its choices in a carefully planned manner to maintain
service availability and supportability.
Decide if a Server Workload Should Be Virtualized
While the public cloud is great, you’ll want to keep many workloads internally on your
company’s systems. As you read this, your company probably has some kind of server
virtualization. It could be VMware ESX, it could be Microsoft Hyper-V, it could be
Citrix XenServer, or it could be something else, and likely your organization is using
multiple hypervisors. The most common scenario that I see is organizations using
ESX and Hyper-V, as they were originally a pure ESX shop, but as Hyper-V
functionally has matured, they have begun migration of some, if not all, workloads for
reasons including cost, management, and compatibility with the cloud.
The default for most organizations is virtual first for any new server workload except
for servers with very high resource requirements and some specialty services, such as
domain controllers that provide the Active Directory domain services for the
environment. (Typically, though, only one domain controller is a physical server,