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There comes a time in every application’s life when it is time to upgrade. It could be a user interface redesign or a hardware refresh. The Azure platform cannot help create an appealing, modern user interface, but it can modernize the supporting infrastructure.

Many organizations will go through a periodic hardware refresh cycle; typically, this happens about every three years. When it is time for a hardware refresh, organizations today have a new question to ask: Should we buy new on-premises hardware, or should we leverage our infrastructure and services to the cloud?

Besides a required hardware refresh, an organization might choose to migrate to the cloud because it has reached physical capacity limits in its existing on-premises datacenter or because it is going to in the very near future. Perhaps the current datacenter does not have enough physical space for more servers or cannot supply the necessary power or cooling. Maybe there is a desire to eliminate or reduce the management of hardware infrastructure going forward. Moving to the cloud might enable the organization to get out of the datacenter business completely, or at least partially. In this case, Microsoft is responsible for the hardware and related infrastructure components of the datacenter, and the organization can focus on providing great business solutions.

Some organizations will choose to migrate to the cloud to get capacity in new geographies they can’t currently support because they have no presence in that area or because it would be cost-prohibitive. There are Azure datacenters in over 22 regions around the world from Melbourne to Amsterdam and from Sao Paulo to Singapore. Additionally, Microsoft has an arrangement with 21Vianet, making Azure available in two regions in China. Microsoft has also announced the deployment of Azure to another eight regions. Instead of building and maintaining a global datacenter presence, an organization can elect to take advantage of Microsoft’s existing investments and deploy to multiple regions with ease.

Should the choice be to modernize or migrate to the cloud, there is certainly a wealth of Azure resources available. In choosing to adopt these resources, an organization could have many questions to answer, including these:

 Do we leverage platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or both?

 Instead of maintaining a custom solution, should we leverage platform-provided services such as Azure Search or Azure Media Services?

 Should we move everything, or just some components? What hybrid model works best for our requirements?

 Which Azure region(s) should we use?

 How does using Azure affect our business and operations model?

 What is our service level agreement (SLA)? What is our disaster recovery story?

Source of Information : Microsoft Azure Essentials Fundamentals of Azure Second Edition