Organizations that are eager to throw themselves into the AI fray are often also balancing other initiatives, including cloud migration, Korolis says. And, he adds, to stay competitive and ensure progress, keep doing both.
“The most successful practice is to divide and conquer,” he explains. “Allocate some teams to keep migrating on-premises workloads, and at the same time carve off teams of innovators who are encouraged to experiment on new projects. That’s how you create more value, faster.”
“More value, faster” is a rallying cry for many companies, but he warns that it can also mean rushing past the essential groundwork and flinging yourself into an abyss of complications down the road.
“Customers need to spend more time in the planning phase. A lot of customers want to rush past that phase and get right to deployment, but honestly, those projects often go off the rails,” Korolis says. “Planning is essential. We find that the really successful customers might spend months in the planning phase getting the cloud strategy hammered out and getting everyone in the organization aligned before they even engage an implementation partner.”
The importance of planning is one of the reasons recent Azure offerings distinguish between the planning and deployment phases, he adds.
For instance, Azure Migrate and Modernize, which helps efficiently move existing workloads to Azure at scale, helps you discover and assess the on-premises environment before you deploy, and determine the best migration plan and Azure architecture upfront.
Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate offer customer benefits like assessments, pilot/proof-of-concepts and deployment assistance from experts. Customers receive offers that can consist of expert guidance, partner funding, Azure credits, migration tooling and technical skilling. Customers are able to accelerate their projects with these offers since they’re based on proven approaches used by thousands of other customers.
“From our standpoint, the most crucial thing to look at is which providers give you end-to-end help to get you to their cloud,” Korolis says. “What we see is that different providers have varying amounts of investment in their customers, and Microsoft’s priority is helping customers succeed.”