Modernisation and Migration in the Cloud from Microsoft Inspire 2021

Microsoft Inspire, the annual conference virtually held two weeks ago is designed to help the partner community to understand Microsoft’s roadmap, and participate in latest innovations and early previews. Our customers know we have always been passionate about innovation providing customer benefits, and our recently awarded Expert MSP status will further help us glean great technology insights. This year provided a couple of themes that will help our customers, wherever they are on their Cloud Adoption journey, migration (unsurprisingly) and modernisation in the cloud.

Modernisation.

Help is available for customers looking to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild applications or in a whole new vein, workplaces.

1. New programs have been announced to assist customers in modernising apps, infrastructure and data. Our team is here and on hand to see how you can take advantage of Microsoft funding and skills.  In addition , we now have tooling that supports deploying containerised apps to the Azure App Service. The App Containerization tool helps modernize existing ASP.NET and Java web apps by packaging them as containers and deploying the containerized app to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Azure App Service Containers. Talk to us to check out your options or accept the Azure Innovate Marketplace offer here. 
2. Customers who have never used virtual desktops before or who are looking to optimise their existing RDS, Citrix or VMware desktops now have plenty of solutions and pathways. In fact, so much of this year’s event was focused on this workstream, and so many questions were asked, that we’ve released a new engagement called Virtual Desktop Design, which answers any questions you may have on cloud-based desktops. Find out more today by getting in touch with our solution architects or accept the Azure Design Marketplace offer here.

Migration.

It is quite clear that customers innovate on their own terms and pace. Two programs that could help are Extended Security Updates and Azure Arc, which enables Azure services at any location.

1. Customers who have on-premises Windows Server 2012, or SQL Server 2012. can get free 3-year Extended Security Updates (ESUs) if they move their servers to Azure. Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Support will end October 10, 2023. SQL Server 2012 Extended Support ends July 12, 2022.  Plus, Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 three-year ESUs are coming to an end January 10, 2023, and July 12, 2022, respectively.  Windows Server and SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 now have a security update extension for one additional year in Azure. Know your options for SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 End of Support – Microsoft SQL Server Blog.  Talk to us to check out your options or accept the Azure Discover Marketplace offer here.
2. Macquarie Cloud Services is a big proponent of the right workload in the right place mantra, and Azure Arc provides that freedom to manage workloads wherever they are, along with the same consistency, governance and management framework as we have with native Azure workloads. With Azure Arc, you can organize, govern, and secure your servers and Kubernetes clusters across data centres, the edge, and multi-cloud environments, with similar management plane tooling.
   1. Arc enabled servers on-premises running Windows Server 2008SP1 and upwards, Ubuntu 16.04, CentOS Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is just the start. Once you have a line of sight to the vCenter server and ESXi hosts, and the on-premises servers are connected to Azure, it becomes an Arc enabled server and is treated as a resource in Azure. Each Arc enabled server has a Resource ID, a managed system identity, and is managed as part of a resource group inside a subscription, with the Azure security Center, update management, Azure Policy etc. framework.
   2. Arc-enabled Azure SQL (think PaaS like SQL Managed Instances) mean on-premises databases can stay up to date and governed and managed the same way as Azure assets.
   3. And connecting an on-premises SQL server to Azure Arc (preview) can enable nice goodies like an on-demand evaluation of the SQL server configuration or advanced data security services.

Here is a really easy scenario we’ve used to present VMs into the Azure portal and management tools. Talk to us to check out your options or accept the Azure Discover Marketplace offer here.