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5 Tips to get the most out of your Azure Migration

How do I get the most out of my move to the Azure cloud platform? It’s a common question we often hear.

There are certain things you don’t want to do when you migrate to Azure.

In this article, we’ll cover the best strategies for migrating to Azure, and show you how to get the most out of the cloud platform.

Author

Niels Kroeze IT Business Copywriter

Reading time 4 minutes Published: 28 November 2025

5 Rs of cloud migration: rationalise

Every application needs its own migration strategy – one size does NOT fit all.

One of the first steps is to evaluate the 5Rs. They are important for your migration strategy; your “toolkit” for rationalising every application and workload you have.

Rehost: Rehosting (lift and shift) refers to moving workloads as they are towards the cloud as quickly as possible with minimal changes.
Replatform: “Replatforming”, also known as Lift and Reshape, is when you make small tweaks to benefit from Azure services, like migrating your database to Azure SQL.
Refactor/Rearchitect: Refactoring involves rearchitecting your app for the cloud, perhaps breaking it into microservices or introducing containers. The goal is to align better with the new cloud environment.
Repurchase: Repurchasing means swapping old apps for newer alternative one. Here, you buy a different version of what you have, often in the form of a SaaS application.
Retire: Sometimes, the smartest choice is to turn off what you no longer need.

Read suggestion:

Learn more about the 5 common strategies for cloud rationalisation.

As you can see, some of these actions are about removing or replacing workloads. On the other hand, others unlock cloud-native benefits – scalability, automation, and resiliency.

However, they also come with increased complexity and a higher upfront investment. The further you move toward cloud-native, the greater the long-term rewards, but only when the approach fits the workload.

2. Right-size your workloads

One of the biggest mistakes in cloud migration is simply moving everything as-is. That often leads to wasted spend.

The cloud gives you infinite power to rightsize: match resources to actual needs rather than peak guesses. Autoscale ensure you only pay for what you use. Because your VM, which has 32 cores and 128 GB of RAM today, may not need it tomorrow.

Newer CPU versions have increased efficiency, making right-sizing easier than before. Remember that in the cloud, every penny you save on infrastructure is one you can reinvest for innovation.

3. Modernise

Monolithic apps typically consist of front-end, middleware, and back-end layers. Breaking these elements into, for example, a microservices architecture, can increase flexibility, allowing you to manage, scale, and update components independently.

Modernising and transforming your apps to use PaaS or microservices can unlock agility, resiliency, and speed. With PaaS, you can offload infrastructure management, allowing you to focus on code. Microservices provide fine-grained scalability. Modernisation, in general, is a superpower, but only when it's applied with purpose. Be cautious because microservices can introduce additional complexity. They're mainly an excellent fit for apps that need to scale fast or often change.

4. Availability

Microsoft Azure offers an impressive 99.99979% uptime guarantee, but that doesn’t guarantee your business is protected during a disaster. Availability is more than just “uptime”. It's about business continuity. Azure gives you options:

Local protects against hardware failures within a data centre.
Zonal shields you from data centre outages.
Regional prepares you for large-scale disasters.

You can mix zonal and regional together for the ultimate protection across multiple regions and multiple data centres in each. It's important to design for the level of availability your business needs.

5. Iterate

Don’t assume when you move to the cloud you’re done; it’s just the beginning of your cloud journey. The most successful migrations deliver business value, not just technical change.

Use each migration as a chance to rethink and reshape technology within your organisation. Select the optimal path for each workload, measure the results, and continually improve.

Iteration ensures that your cloud environment grows smarter, more efficient, and better aligned with business objectives.

Closing thoughts

We’ve covered how you can get the most out of your move to Azure. These practices reduce cloud waste, lower costs, and allow you to build a more resilient cloud environment.

Remember, cloud migration isn’t a one-time project. Review, optimise, and refine your cloud environment continuously to get the most value from the cloud.