1. Modernize to the
Microsoft Cloud
Empowering business
for what’s next

2. Tableof
contents
03
Why modernize
now
04
Provide digital
capabilities at
speed
05
Datacenter
consolidation:
Reduce your
digital footprint
06
Protect your
environment
07
Move beyond
unsupported
legacy systems
08
Optimization and
Modernization
09
Support your digital
ambition
10
In Summary
11
What’s next

3. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Whymodernizenow
The world is changing at an ever-faster pace.
The world is changing at an ever-faster pace. To keep up, organizations have
been embracing digital transformation to help them reimagine how they bring
together people, data, and processes to create value for customers and stay
competitive in a digital-first world. Of course, this transformation doesn’t
happen overnight. One critical key to success is providing a modern technology
environment as a foundation to support transformation. To do that, many
organizations are looking to the cloud to modernize their environments with a
more secure, agile, and scalable technology platform.
Modernization is a key part of your digital transformation journey, and where you begin
depends on where you are and your organization’s most urgent needs. Most organizations
have some mix of these key drivers:
Business innovation requiring new digital capabilities at speed
Get out of the business of owning and maintaining datacenters
Security protections of business assets and customer data
Address unsupported legacy systems
Foundation for Transformation
Optimization and Modernization
Support your digital ambition
This eBook takes a closer look at each of these key drivers, the benefits of adopting a cloud
modernization strategy to address them, and how Microsoft Services can help.
“As we made the digital
transformation, we needed a
reputable partner with the right
experience. Based on our selection
criteria, we found that Microsoft
Services came out the best.
“ Andy Laurence
Senior Director, Head of Production Services
A.P. Moller - Maersk
03

4. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Providedigital
capabilitiesatspeed
How can you help your business be more agile
and innovative?
Many organizations are looking at opportunities to create new business models,
partnerships, and ecosystems that can be challenging to deliver with traditional
IT environments. Reassessing your existing IT portfolio, including infrastructure
and applications, as well as your current processes and roles, can help you better
understand how you can leverage cloud technologies to deliver value faster. By
modernizing with a cloud platform and technologies you can provide digital
capabilities at speed, which means your organization can:
Go from idea to production faster and encourage experimentation
Increase profitability, market share, and productivity goals
Deliver value faster with flexible architecture
How Microsoft Services can help:
We have an end-to-end, consistent approach to modernization and DevOps.
As a leader in software development for the past 30 years, we bring experience
to your organization. Our goal is to help you transform your environment, so
you can deliver continuous value to your customers. We’ve built our approach
based on experience with thousands of our own customers, as well as on our own
transformation journey.
“With DevOps and Azure, we’re able
to reduce our new-feature release
cycle down to one week, and we
think we can even speed that up.
“ Fikri Larguet
Director of Cloud Services, GEICO
04

5. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Datacenterconsolidation:
Reduceyourdigital
footprint
How can you get out of the business of owning
and maintaining datacenters?
Many organizations like yours got into the datacenter business by necessity over a
period of years due to huge storage requirements, mergers and acquisitions, or
outsourcing. Reducing capital expenditures and administration to make room for
newer investments that drive innovation can be daunting. Holistic modernization
can help you reduce operational expenses and enable you to leverage more elastic
resources for greater efficiency.
Reduce CapEx
By moving some or all of your server infrastructure to the cloud, you can:
Reduce or eliminate costs for expensive datacenters or outsourced
datacenter agreements
Minimize server management and reduce application redundancies
Integrate heterogenous infrastructure inherited with mergers or
acquisitions
Leverage elastic resources
With cloud-based infrastructure, you can expand or decrease resource usage to
meet changing demand without worrying about capacity planning and engineering
for peak usage. Cloud services often include built-in monitoring tools that enable
you to allocate additional resources without disrupting operations.
How Microsoft Services can help:
Our experience with thousands of companies gives us a unique perspective on
current on-premises customer environments and how to help you transition to
the cloud most effectively.
“Before, we had to purchase and
hold servers in reserve for expected
peaks such as Cyber Monday. We
used forecasts from previous years
to estimate how many servers
we would need and often ended
up over-allocated when the peak
was over. With Azure, we scale
when needed and avoid huge
overprovisioning costs.
“ Ralph Feltis
Senior Software Engineer, E-Commerce,
Alaska Airlines
05

6. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXTEMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Protectyour
environment
How can you better secure business
assets and customer data?
Handing over most, or even some, responsibility for managing security for your
business environment may feel counterintuitive at first. But take a hard look at
the truth: with on-premises environments, IT must wait for software and
hardware providers to offer updates and patches when security issues are found.
Then, they must spend time applying updates and patches to ensure they don’t
conflict with one another, leaving your critical business and customer data
vulnerable to threats that much longer. Even a best-of-breed approach can still
leave big gaps if third-party solutions don’t work well together, leaving you open
to ever more sophisticated security threats. By moving to a cloud platform like
Microsoft Azure, you can provide identity-based protection that is much
stronger than traditional perimeter-based approaches. In addition, built-in
security controls and intelligence help you easily identify and respond to
threats and security gaps, allowing your organization to rapidly improve
your security posture.
How Microsoft Services can help:
Microsoft invests over $1 billion a year in security and helps our customers
understand how to achieve a secure and modern enterprise that provides
protection at every level: identity, infrastructure, and applications. Microsoft
Services Digital Protection program provides an end-to-end view of your
cybersecurity and identity posture by helping you identify the threat landscape
and prioritize the highest risks. When you partner with Microsoft Services,
we help you determine how best to protect your enterprise against evolving
cybersecurity threats, securely move to the cloud, and keep your data safe.
“Using Microsoft Azure—whether
exclusively or as part of a hybrid
cloud deployment— we are able
to bridge traditional infrastructure
barriers while meeting the security
and privacy needs of our customers
around the world.
“ Evren Eryurek
Software Chief Technology Officer, GE Healthcare
06

7. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Movebeyond
unsupported
legacysystems
How can you get beyond outdated IT systems
and applications that cause complexity and
security concerns?
If you are still running business-critical, unsupported legacy systems on-
premises—whether on physical or virtual servers--you could be putting your
organization at risk. Discontinued updates and support can leave servers and
applications vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can increase operational costs.
Or maybe your IT or development teams face technical debt issues and are
constantly required to rework code behind systems that were built using older
technologies. All this in an effort to try and keep up with changing regulations
and ensure your environment remains in compliance with regulatory or
industry standards.
How Microsoft Services can help:
Simply “lifting and shifting” your existing assets does not address unsupported
legacy systems. We take a focused approach to solving business problems with
transformational, organization-wide technical solutions and processes. We aim
to help drive a paradigm shift away from typical upgrade cycles and instead help
you focus on new capabilities made possible with cloud native services.
“Grant Thornton International Limited
needed to change a mission-
critical application, and Microsoft
Services are enabling this digital
transformation. We will have one
source of truth for each audit. And
that source of truth will be on the
Azure environment.
“ Anthony Nettleton
Global Leader Assurance Services, Grant Thorton
07

8. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
Optimizationand
Modernization
Taking advantage of cloud services to
maximize business impact
Optimization is about taking advantage of cloud services with minimal
application or data changes. Modernization, on the other hand, is about
rearchitecting applications and data for the cloud. This tends to provide the
greatest benefit to businesses and organizations, however requires the most
effort and time to implement.
Where possible, both Optimization and Modernization are performed when
migrating to the cloud, however there are instances, like cost constraints and the
need to migrate as quickly as possible that may limit the degree to which they
can be implemented during migration. With the introduction of new cloud
services for both Optimization and Modernization, if they are not implemented
during migration, it could be done immediately after, and it may present
opportunities for businesses and organizations to drive business innovation,
keep down costs, and remain in a technically supported environment.
How Microsoft Services can help:
Optimization and Modernization can be performed as part of a migration to
the cloud, however that same expertise and approach can also be leveraged for
ongoing Optimization and Modernization of applications already in the cloud.
“We’re a lot faster in trying out stuff
and bringing a team up to speed,
which means faster time-to-market
with new products.
“ Peter Rothlaender
Manager of Cloud Solutions, Daimler AG
08

9. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
Supportyour
digitalambition
Wherever you are on your digital journey, you can tailor your modernization
approach to your most pressing objective, whether that’s driving new business
or simply replacing legacy infrastructure with cloud-based services to ensure
compliance:
New digital business or new products. You can experiment and iterate quickly
to develop and deploy new products to public clouds that already exist around
the world, enabling you to reach and disrupt new markets and create new
revenue streams much faster than before.
Digital effectiveness. A cloud-based approach to IT and DevOps can increase
your effectiveness by enabling shorter development cycles and more frequent,
faster deployments of new or updated products or features to support both
employees and customers.
Digital efficiencies. By relying on an evergreen cloud services platform, you
gain real efficiencies by eliminating administration for server updates and
maintenance, without putting your organization’s security at risk.
Digital replacement. By replacing your current on-premises environment with
a secure cloud infrastructure, you can future-proof your infrastructure against
aging systems and out of date services, helping you to manage operational costs
and ensure better compliance with regulatory and industry standards.
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
How Microsoft Services can help:
Through our thought leadership and modernization approach in helping our
customers transform, we can help you regardless of where you are in your
modernization journey: whether you are starting to replace existing processes or
are farther along in your transformation.
“Microsoft Azure is the cornerstone
in our digital strategy, providing one
common platform shared by all our
transport and logistics businesses.
On Azure, we are also creating a
marketplace of apps and digital
products that improve operations
and drive better business decisions.
“ Ibrahim Gokcen
Chief Digital Officer, A.P. Moller - Maersk
09

10. In Summary…
Our goal is to help you along your journey by working with
you to envision the possibilities for your organization, and
to define your cloud modernization strategy requirements
to help you stay competitive in a digital-first world.
As discussed in the previous sections: We help your
organization be more agile and innovative, reduce your
digital footprint with datacenter consolidation, secure your
business assets and customer data, move beyond your
unsupported legacy systems, and take advantage of cloud
services, all while supporting your digital ambition.
Microsoft Services provides an end-to-end approach that we’ve honed
with thousands of companies and experience with millions of applications.
Because we have built the infrastructure from the ground up, we have
unique perspectives on identity-based security, modernizing business
critical applications, and migration strategies that address both Windows
and Linux/OSS/Unix applications, including migration to containers.
We invite you to contact your Microsoft representative to learn more.
For more information about Consulting and Support Solutions from
Microsoft, visit www.microsoft.com/services.
10

11. MODERNIZE TO THE MICROSOFT CLOUD
EMPOWERING BUSINESS FOR WHAT’S NEXT
What’snext?
No matter where you are on your cloud adoption journey,
Microsoft Services can help.
For more information visit: https://aka.ms/modernization
Credits
Many subject-matter experts from various groups at Microsoft contributed to
the conceptualization and articulation of the story contained in this document.
Mark Piggott
Business Program Manager,
Microsoft Services
Magdalena Kasiewicz
Sr. Business Program
Manager, Microsoft Services
Amy McCullough
Director Product Marketing,
Microsoft Services
Contributors
Alex Bogdanovsky
Architect Manager, Americas
Anthony Cafarelli
Architect, Cross-workload
David Stoker
Architect, Microsoft Services
Ian Nelson
Consultant
Ivan Bondy
Architect
Yunus Emre Alpozen
Associate Architect
Stephen Kaufman
Sr. Architect, ACTO
Blair Shaw
Associate Architect,
Microsoft Services
Aly Shivji
Director Business Programs,
Microsoft Services
Binil Arvind Pillai
Director, Cybersecurity Identity Solutions
Strategy, Microsoft Services
Evan Ilias
Director, Business Programs,
Microsoft Services
John Johanneson
Director, Solution Spec
Keith Rouser
Director, Solution Spec
Paul Brunelle
Director, Sub PMM
11
Proven approach
Whether it be Lift and Shift through
Application Modernization, and
anything in between, we have a proven
approach to help find the right fit for
each application.
Agility
Access to Microsoft product groups
helps make sure we are on the
cutting edge of technology, and
helps us to use rapid design and
development methodologies.
Security
Security across devices, apps, and
infrastructure is a fundamental part
of our approach.
Scale
Microsoft Services has a repeatable
and scalable delivery team blending
Consulting with a Modernization
Factory team (consisting of
Microsoft and Partner specialists).

12. Microsoft Services empowers organizations
to accelerate the value realized from their
digital experiences.
Imagine.
Realize.
Experience.
microsoft.com/services
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