To provide enterprise businesses the tools needed to give them a leg up when migrating to the cloud, Microsoft Corp. today announced two new Azure offerings during Microsoft Inspire 2023, “Azure Migrate and Modernize” and “Azure Innovate,” aimed at helping them on that journey.

The company’s flagship program Azure Migration and Modernization Program was transformed into the newly expanded Azure Migrate and Modernize, which took many of the same frameworks of the original and increased its capabilities to tackle new needs. These include increased capacities and the availability of support for high-performance computing.

Azure Innovate is a new advanced product that provides companies with what they need to build their own custom and complex cloud-native apps that can use artificial intelligence with access to state-of-the-art monitoring and analytics.

“Each organization’s cloud journey vary – some organizations need support migrating to the cloud, while others need help building new applications using cloud-native architecture or leveraging AI,” said Cyril Belikoff, general manager of go-to-market for Azure and industry clouds at Microsoft. “Whether you are migrating to gain efficiency, improve security, create an AI-ready data estate; or to build your own AI-infused solutions — now you have the curated resources you need in one place.”

With access to both of these product offerings, enterprise customers will gain guidance with assessments for their current approaches for their cloud journey from start to finish allowing them to migrate from their existing frameworks providing proof of concepts, tooling and deployment assistance.

They includes technical frameworks such as the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Azure Well-Architected Framework, which are prebuilt studied implementations of cloud journeys that will allow enterprise customers to get started to help optimize workloads, including security strategies, best practices for cost management, short- and long-term objectives.

Secure migration technologies and tools will allow customers to quickly get their systems into the cloud including popular enterprise apps and databases such as SAP, Oracle and Linux, as well as Windows Server and SQL server. With Azure Migrate, a free automated tool for discoverability and operational assessment, customers can quickly map out and virtualize the company’s software infrastructure and prepare it for cloud migration.

To make this all possible, Microsoft experts and specialist partners will be on hand during the program process to provide assistance at each step of the cloud modernization journey, the company said. That includes planning sessions, assessments, analysis for total cost of ownership, cloud adoption approaches, workshops and deployment.

Enterprise customers looking to build their own AI copilots will want to look into Azure Inspire, Microsoft said. Experts in the field of artificial intelligence will be made available along with resources, tooling and cloud-native capabilities that will make it easy for businesses to use their own data to train and deploy AI into their apps.

“With their robust set of tools and resources, Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate will help enable a smooth transition to the cloud, providing you with flexibility, scalability and cost savings on your own terms,” said Belikoff.

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