Modern applications require data to be available quickly and stored securely and accessible from all over the world. Organizations are creating more data than ever, so storing data in the cloud requires addressing new problems in a flexible way. Azure provides a variety of cloud storage services for different types of data and migrating data from your On-Premises or Cloud In¬frastructure.

Azure Data Migration Service is a managed service that enables migrating from multiple data sources to Azure data platforms with minimal downtime. It supports migrating from on premises databases or databases already in the cloud either within Azure or in Amazon Web Services.

The scenarios of Data transfer will fall into online versus offline migrations. With offline migrations, the source database is taken offline when the migration starts. With online migrations, downtime is limited to the time to cut over at the end of the migration.

When migrating databases from on premises, Azure Database Migration Service supports two modes, and they depend on the connectivity available from on prem. If your on premises network is connected to the Azure network that the migration service is deployed to, then the migration can run from within Azure. The networks need to be connected using a VPN gateway connection.



If no such connection is in place, then you can perform the migration in hybrid mode where you download an executable to your on premises environment. And use a certificate attached to an app registration in Azure Active Directory in order to authenticate to Azure and migrate the data to the cloud.



Let's look at a scenario where we are moving a Database from one of our Test VM to Azure cloud. In order to make sure this on premises database will have no compatibility issues moving to Azure, we will be using DMA.





If we will open it up, there are two main categories covered, feature parity between SQL servers on premises and in the cloud and any potential compatibility issues. Once you've performed the assessment, you can upload the results to a service called Azure Migrate.



Azure Migrate helps you move VMs to the cloud, but it's also a place where you can keep an inventory of the assessments you've done against your on premises databases.



Now let's look at the Azure Database Migration Service. We need to create a new instance of the service in our subscription. As you can see, we are using hybrid mode, which means we've downloaded and configured a worker agent on the local SQL Server. And it says on this page that the agent is online.



Let's open the existing migration product we created within the service. If we edit the activity, first, you configure the source database and enter the authentication information. When it connects to the on premises database, you can select the source database you want to migrate as shown in below steps.



Source Details:





Next, you configure the target database.



Go back to the home page for the migration project, and let's open the activity. It shows that the migration has already been run, and 71 tables were migrated from the on premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database.



Besides needing to migrate the data and databases up to Azure, you're most likely going to need to migrate non structured data also, like the data on file shares. There's a utility in every storage account that can help you determine the best approach for your requirements.



Data transfer tab, you can select the estimated amount of data that you want to transfer, the approximate speed of the connection from your on premises environment to Azure, and how often you plan to transfer this amount of data, whether it's a onetime thing or this may be part of an application that needs to upload new data on a schedule or just ad hoc.



This blog will help you to smoothly perform the Migration of your On-premises /Cloud data to you Azure Storage account.