Migration to Azure — plan and pitfalls

Assessment

This section frames the topic "Assessment" in the context of Migration to Azure — plan and pitfalls. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.

What you gain

• Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
• High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
• Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.

Most common mistakes

• Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
• No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
• Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.

Migration models

A smooth rollout to the cloud is not a one-off action — it is a project in 4 phases. Cutting them short "to go faster" is the shortest path to an outage.

Phase 1: Audit and dependency map

We inventory systems, integrations, licences, accounts and users. The output is a list of what can be moved as is, what needs a refactor and what should be sunset.

Phase 2: Pilot

We pick one team (5–15 people), migrate them under controlled conditions and collect feedback. Findings feed back into the main plan.

Phase 3: Main migration

Rolled out in waves (typically 30–50 people per week), always with a helpdesk on standby on day one after cutover. Data, mail and permissions migrate before the users, not with them.

Phase 4: Reinforcement

Training, documentation, procedures and handover to steady-state operations. Without this phase the investment quickly loses value, because the knowledge stays in the heads of 2–3 people.

Costs

A conversation about cloud costs starts with a single question: what exactly are we buying?. In practice there are three types of billing: flat fee, hourly, and mixed (base + overage). Each makes sense in a different scenario.

• Flat fee — a predictable cost, best for companies with a stable number of users and systems.
• Hourly — flexible, but hard to budget for a whole year.
• Mixed — the base covers 80% of the work, overage is billed separately; the most common model in SMEs.

What to watch for in a quote

The rate alone is not everything. Check what exactly the price covers, what the hour cap is, how out-of-scope projects are priced and whether travel is billed. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive offer in Poland can be 3–4× — and it usually comes down to what is "in the price" and what is not.

Security

Modern IT security works in layers. No single solution protects a company 100% — only a full set of layers (identity, endpoints, network, data, people) provides real effect. In the context of Migration to Azure — plan and pitfalls it is worth starting with the basics:

• MFA on all accounts (no exceptions for the board — the most common gap).
• EDR/XDR instead of classic antivirus — it detects behaviour, not just signatures.
• Backups in several locations, including an offline or immutable copy — ransomware cannot encrypt them.
• Patches within 14 days of the vendor's release.
• Anti-phishing training at least quarterly, with simulations.

FinOps

A conversation about cloud costs starts with a single question: what exactly are we buying?. In practice there are three types of billing: flat fee, hourly, and mixed (base + overage). Each makes sense in a different scenario.

• Flat fee — a predictable cost, best for companies with a stable number of users and systems.
• Hourly — flexible, but hard to budget for a whole year.
• Mixed — the base covers 80% of the work, overage is billed separately; the most common model in SMEs.

What to watch for in a quote

The rate alone is not everything. Check what exactly the price covers, what the hour cap is, how out-of-scope projects are priced and whether travel is billed. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive offer in Poland can be 3–4× — and it usually comes down to what is "in the price" and what is not.