Over the next few years, it’s likely that companies will look for professionals who possess the wherewithal needed to migrate systems to cloud infrastructures.
A survey of 312 enterprise IT professionals conducted by Business Cloud News discovered that in two years’ time, less than 40 percent of respondents estimated that between 30 and 70 percent of their IT assets will be hosted in the cloud. In addition, 28 percent of study participants asserted that 70 percent or more of their systems and platforms will be cloud-based within the same time period.
Expanding server migration accommodations
Microsoft Azure is one particular cloud service that is gaining traction in among organizations across the globe, and the proprietor is doing everything it can to make it easier for enterprises to transport their systems from on-premise to Azure. While Azure can be used as an infrastructure or a software development platform, it’s a solid choice for those who want to host their servers remotely.
According to ZDNet contributor Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft recently added Linux support to its Migration Accelerator tool, which is tailored to assist professionals in migrating on-premise Windows Server (and now Linux) workloads to Azure. The program is compatible with both physical and virtual Linux machines, specifically the Cent OS (6.4, 6.5) and Oracle Linux (6.4, 6.5) distributions.
Why Linux? As of 2012, Linux operating systems made up 20.7 percent of global server revenue. While it’s been a few years since that report, Linux’s server distros have been often regarded as reliable, flexible choices among those in the industry.
Reducing workload latency
What if a company accesses servers from an Azure data center located 500 miles away when there’s an identical facility located 50 miles from its offices? ZDNet’s David Chernicoff regarded Microsoft’s Azure Data Center Migration Solution, an open source tool that allows users to move existing VMs between Azure data centers. This tool allows professionals to:
- Implement the same solution configuration across multiple data centers
- Transition between different subscriptions seamlessly
- Mix deployments regardless of infrastructure or platform-based services
These three capabilities are a basic overview of what Azure customers can do with the technology. One special feature includes compatibility with reserved IP, internal load balancers and static internal IPs. In addition, users can sanction the migration of a high-availability SharePoint farm.
Given the flexibility and versatility of Microsoft’s migration tools, it’s clear the company is doing all that it can to make Azure a more attractive service for enterprises of all sizes and industries.