Optimize Resources.

Azure Architecture Review

One of the most critical initial steps conducted during the resource optimization process is an Azure Architecture Review. During this process, an enterprise will take a deep dive into their existing technology and architecture to better understand how they’re set up, how the system is performing, and what gaps exist between the current state and best practices. As part of the assessment, you should use Azure-native tools and advanced third-party tools to explore:

• Performance history: Take a deep dive into systems, database, and application performance, and better understand the health and utilization of your Microsoft Azure deployment at all levels.

• Current Infrastructure-as-a-Service Architecture: In many cases, initial cloud deployments leverage Microsoft Azure primarily as Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions. By understanding the current state of your architecture, it’s possible to determine if alternate paths such as refactoring to Azure PaaS could result in significant performance gains for your organization.

• Identifying operational management improvements: Explore whether there are strategic opportunities to improve your operational management. From automating key aspects of Azure operations to engaging more advanced features and tools for monitoring and feedback, these analyses can provide data-based recommendations for growth and improvement.

• Eliminating security gaps: Identify what security gaps may exist in your current deployment.

Recommend a path to close gaps and implement the more than 90 security best practices currently recommended for Azure.

Based on the Architecture Review, your enterprise should produce an Azure roadmap with specific recommendations for how to improve performance, eliminate resource waste, and modernize your deployment. This roadmap is delivered as a recommendations report to IT leadership and can provide the action path for your internal team to help bring your Azure cloud resources to maximum optimization and performance.

One of the most attractive benefits of Microsoft Azure is its pay-as-you-go model. Because you’re paying for what you consume, it’s important to right-size solutions for both performance and budget. By relying on real-time analytics, an MSP can outline disk utilization, CPU, and other key metrics to help right-size your deployment for your specific needs. Perhaps your needs have changed since your initial deployment or you’re preparing for rapid growth. Either way, a managed services provider can give you a data-driven lens for optimization.

As Gartner notes, this isn’t just about Azure performance. It can also affect the bottom line. Gartner recommends that IT leaders “drive Azure cost optimization by monitoring utilization and capacity metrics. Schedule and right size Azure allocation-based services. Leverage programmatic discounts. Modernize applications to make use of Microsoft’s own resource optimization services when these are more cost-effective.” Enterprises can assess current Azure usage and spend, and explore different strategies to better align these key areas.

Increasingly, enterprises are seeing the benefits of refactoring Azure IaaS to Azure PaaS. If you’re seeking to modernize your apps and take advantage of Azure’s DevOps and container capabilities, this can help you quickly innovate. In addition, it helps shift your team’s focus entirely to your apps—and eliminates the need to worry about underlying infrastructure, middleware, and software licenses.

Microsoft notes this strategy can be helpful in specific instances: “Often referred to as repackage, this cloud migration strategy involves some change to the application design but no wholesale changes to the application code. Your application can take advantage of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) products, such as Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, and containers.” Enterprise IT architects that understands the business unit’s desired outcome and underlying structure can help determine if Azure PaaS is the right path.

You may be considering Microsoft Azure resource optimization due to the pain points you’ve encountered in day-to-day operations. Optimizing Azure resources can help you find efficient ways to streamline operations, optimize costs, and automate processes.

The reality for many of today’s IT teams is that they’re running lean. Leaders are being asked to get more done with tight teams and budgets—and as a result, automating resource optimization your Microsoft Azure solution can free your IT team up to focus on bigger strategic items.

There are specific strategies that an enterprise should follow, from helping you make the most of Azure-native tools for automation and monitoring to delivering services that optimize your ongoing operations—and help shift the day-to-day burdens off your busy IT team in a cost-effective way. An enterprise can optimize ongoing operations by:

• Implementing remote monitoring solutions to assess ongoing cloud health, application performance, security issues, and much more
• Providing regular reporting to inform IT decision making and simplify status reporting to executives and other organizational stakeholders
• Consolidating billing and communications saving your team critical timing
• Assessing your current utilization and looking at avenues for consolidation, streamlining your architecture, and right sizing your Azure deployment to meet your enterprise’s needs while keeping costs in check

When you’re struggling with operational efficiency, Azure Automate can help with Azure-native

process automation and other solutions designed with business efficiency in mind. Azure Automate delivers a cloud-based automation and configuration service that supports consistent

management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. With Automate, you’ll have complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning workloads and resources.

Azure Automate comprises:

• Process automation
• Configuration management
• Update management
• Shared capabilities
• Heterogeneous features

Microsoft Azure is equipped with a number of native tools that enterprises and their teams can leverage to gain critical Azure resource insights into your utilization—and increase real-time visibility into core aspects of your Azure environment. Your enterprise should ensure that you’re leveraging these tools, capturing the insights, and feeding them back into your Azure deployment for better performance. The key tools include:

Azure Advisor: Advisor is native cloud consultant dashboard that helps you incorporate best practices into your Azure deployments. It analyzes your company’s resource configuration and makes customized recommendations to optimize the cost effectiveness, performance, high availability, and security of your environment. An MSP can configure Advisor for your environment, identify gaps, and rely on these insights for immediate and continuous improvements.

Azure Monitor: With Azure Monitor, you’ll get the insights needed to maximize the availability and performance of your applications and services. Monitor delivers a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing, and providing actionable insights for both your Azure cloud resources and on-premises Microsoft enterprise portfolio. It can help:

• Detect and diagnose application issues
• Identify infrastructure issues for virtual machines and containers
• Support troubleshooting and diagnostics with log analytics
• Streamline operations with smart alerts and automated actions

Azure Security: The Azure Security Center is a unified security management system that strengthens data center security and monitors workloads in the cloud. It offers continuous security monitoring of all assets, provides advanced threat detection, and deploys solutions rapidly to keep environments secure.

Enterprise IT can use these advanced tools to help you understand your Azure environment and optimize them to meet your internal standards, monitoring needs, and much more.

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