Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s platform for discovery, assessment, and migration planning, helping you understand your environment before moving to Azure.
It helps you answer three fundamental questions:
These answers are built using real configuration data, performance history, and dependency insights from your actual environment.
Just as importantly, setting up Azure Migrate does not commit you to a migration. Many organizations use it first to gain visibility, compare options, and build a business case before deciding what to move, when to move it, or whether to move at all.
Azure Migrate setup is straightforward: create the project, deploy the appliance, collect discovery data, run assessments, group workloads into migration waves, and validate with a test cutover before production.
1. Create the Azure Migrate project
Set up an Azure Migrate project as the central workspace for discovery, assessment, and migration planning. This project becomes the single hub where all assessment data, readiness insights, and cost estimates are consolidated. Understanding what Azure migration actually costs including hidden expenses early on helps teams plan budgets more accurately.
2. Deploy the discovery appliance
Deploy the appliance to inventory servers and collect configuration, utilization, and dependency data from your environment.
3. Run discovery and collect enough data
Let Azure Migrate observe the environment long enough to capture representative performance trends rather than relying on assumptions. Preferably, collect no fewer than 21 days of data, and ideally more than 30 days.
4. Run readiness and cost assessments
Use the collected data to evaluate workload readiness, identify risks, right-size Azure resources, and estimate monthly costs.
5. Build migration waves
Group workloads into phased migration waves based on dependencies, remediation needs, and business priority. Dependency mapping helps you see how workloads connect, so you can choose the right approach whether lift-and-shift, hybrid, or cloud-native and sequence moves with less disruption.
6. Validate with a test cutover
Before production, run a test migration in an isolated environment to confirm that workloads behave as expected and to reduce migration-day risk. For stronger confidence in sizing and cost estimates, aim for 90% or higher performance coverage before making final decisions.
Azure Migrate improves migration decisions by giving teams real-time visibility into on-premises workloads, Azure readiness, application dependencies, and estimated cloud costs before any move begins.
These insights help IT teams, finance leaders, and executives align on migration priorities using data instead of assumptions.
Here are the key Azure Migrate benefits that help organizations make faster, lower-risk, and more cost-effective cloud migration decisions:
based on actual usage. Once in Azure, organizations can further reduce cloud spend through ongoing cost optimization strategies.
Azure Migrate plays a key role in financial planning.
Microsoft funding programs for migration and modernization are often tied to projected Azure consumption and workload scope. To qualify, organizations need a credible, data-backed view of what migration will involve.
Azure Migrate assessments provide:
Without this level of detail, funding discussions rely on rough estimates. With it, organizations can approach funding conversations with clarity and confidence.
Funding availability, eligibility, and amounts vary by program and region and are subject to Microsoft approval.
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Azure infrastructure and cloud services, ProArch helps organizations run Azure Migrate assessments, interpret the results, and build a migration plan that IT, finance, and leadership can all stand behind.
What we deliver
Start with an Azure migration assessment engagement to get a clear picture of your environment before committing to a migration path. Talk to our Azure migration experts.