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Move your enterprise applications to Azure faster

There's a lot to consider when migrating to Azure. Read the eBook below (no strings attached) to find out what you need to know.

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Abstract

Risk is a fact of life. But when you’re migrating to the cloud, you want to reduce that risk as much as you can—oh, and get premium availability, performance, data protection, and compliance as well. The good news: You can do it all with the right planning and solutions. Asking these five questions can start you on the journey toward realizing your cloud migration dreams.

Here are the top 5 questions to ask

For organizations that want to evolve, moving enterprise applications to the cloud is simply inevitable—but that doesn’t mean migration is simple. In fact, 70% of organizations face challenges in cloud migration.

But you don’t have to let bumps in the road defeat your dreams of digital transformation. You can meet even the trickiest migration challenges with smart planning and proven solutions. But before you can find solutions, you need to identify potential problems. Here are some questions to ask that can help you with that process.

1. How can I simplify migration and operations in the cloud?

One of the thorniest migration problems is addressing the application reliability risks in a new cloud environment compared to what has been achieved with on-premises infrastructure. The built-in data management features of on-premises deployments are often missing in cloud infrastructure. Not only does this create extra work for your team, it heightens the risk of data loss and can cause performance issues that slow down cloud migration and overall functionality.

Without ready-to-use enterprise storage in the cloud, businesses often have to build file servers themselves. This is an unnecessary outlay of resources that can result in sub-par performance and reliability. And you don’t migrate to the cloud so you can experience reliability headaches.

The solution provides full data management in Azure, including all the setup, configuration, and updates of on-prem enterprise file storage—without the complexity.

Azure NetApp Files storage service solves these issues for enterprises that want to easily move and manage mission-critical applications in the cloud, including workloads such as SAP, Linux, Oracle and SQL Server workloads, Windows Virtual Desktop, HPC, and more.

The solution provides full data management in Azure, including all the setup, configuration, and updates of on-prem enterprise file storage—without the complexity.

Azure NetApp Files is a first-party Microsoft service, which keeps things simple and familiar. You can deploy and manage the directory from the Azure Portal or automate using the Azure API or CLI integration for a seamless Azure experience.

2. How can I get the performance I need for my most demanding applications?

Unfortunately, frustration can be a part of the cloud migration experience—such as when file storage capabilities or scalability aren’t adequate for core business applications to reach premium performance.

Azure NetApp Files can help you feel frustration-free by eliminating storage bottlenecks by scaling performance with the allocated capacity, up to 4.5GBps per volume. Azure NetApp Files also allows you to seamlessly scale both performance and capacity up and down on-demand to 100TB per volume.

And because Azure NetApp Files is built in the Azure data center with direct access to compute nodes, it delivers agility, sub-millisecond latency and high performance on par or better than on-premises storage.

3. How can I make sure that my data is available when I need it?

Data doesn’t do much good if it’s not available when your business-critical applications need it. When it’s not, systems and applications that depend on data can suffer major disruptions.

Azure NetApp Files offers 99.99% availability and high reliability for all your core business environments including SAP, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server (over SMB).

Azure NetApp Files offers what you need

    • 99.9%
    • availability
    • 4.5GBps
    • per volume
    • 100TB
    • per volume

4. How can I make sure my data is protected?

Data protection is a major concern when you’re moving core applications to the cloud—especially when you are dealing with sensitive information such as financial, personal, and healthcare data and must comply with strict data storage requirements. You need to feel confident that your data is protected both at rest and in flight.

Azure NetApp Files offers built-in capabilities to ensure the highest levels of data protection in Azure with access control and always-on encryption. Critical security and compliance capabilities include FIPS-140-2 compliant data encryption at rest, RBAC, AD authentication, and export policies for network-based ACLs. Azure NetApp Files also complies with leading industry certifications such as HIPAA and GDPR.

The solution also helps you prevent accidental data loss and corruption with built-in, rapid backup and restore capabilities based on NetApp Snapshot technology. You can also easily move your data across regions when you need to create secondary and tertiary copies to protect against site failures.

5. How can I meet my application requirements most cost effectively?

With cloud solutions, you want to get what you pay for, but you don’t want to pay for more than you get. Azure NetApp Files eliminates storage bottlenecks for enterprise applications. That means cloud infrastructure can be reduced by up to 60%, and costs go down as well.

Because Azure NetApp Files is fully integrated as a part of the Azure infrastructure, you consume it from your Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) Azure commit directly—no additional licenses required. On top of this, you get reduced costs with a smaller storage footprint as NetApp Snapshot copies don’t add to your Azure data footprint.

It’s easy to adjust both service levels and capacity in seconds without a time-consuming data copy, so that you always have what you need without paying for more. Just turn Azure NetApp Files on automatically from your Azure portal and select service and performance levels.
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Reduce risk, increase performance

Azure NetApp Files provides answers to many of the big questions around cloud migration for enterprise applications. The file storage solution offers low-latency performance, high-level reliability and availability, and advanced data management so that you can make the most out of the cloud. Find out how you can confidently move your enterprise to the cloud without compromising on everything your core business applications need.

Next steps

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Migrate even the most demanding workloads with confidence with Azure NetApp Files.

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