Brennan recently assessed a health and nutrition manufacturer’s production estate, ahead of a disaster recovery move to Azure. The virtual machines were running in a third-party private cloud and were headed for a straight lift and shift.
The assessment found that many workloads could be rehosted, but their technical readiness did not remove the need to examine licensing, supportability and cost.
The problem we identified sat in the licensing. Several Windows Server operating systems in scope required closer review of their support and licensing position.
Moving to Azure creates the opportunity to resolve legacy risk, rather than carrying unsupported operating systems and their remediation costs into the new environment.
That’s just one estate. The wider numbers point the same way.
Flexera’s 2026 survey of more than 750 cloud decision makers puts the share of cloud spend going to waste at 29%, the first rise in five years, while Gartner’s May 2026 forecast has Australian organisations spending A$33.6 billion on public cloud this year, up 17.9% on 2025. A growing share of a growing number.
A migration tool moves a workload. It doesn’t repair one. Whatever was wrong with a server on Friday is still wrong on Monday, now running on metered infrastructure with an invoice attached.
So, the decisions that matter happen well before anything moves. Four stages, and each one turns on a decision. What deserves to move (Assess). What needs to exist before anything does (Establish). How much of the old estate travels with it (Modernise). Whether it still earns its cost a year later (Optimise).
Know what to modernise before you move
We start by measuring. Azure Migrate goes into the environment and collects live performance and inventory data from the servers themselves, over a window long enough to catch real load rather than a quiet afternoon. For the manufacturer, that picture differed from the documentation.
Alongside it, discovery workshops establish what the business is trying to solve: data centre lease ending, perhaps a compliance deadline. In our example, it was reliance on a third-party private cloud with limited resilience and little cost visibility.
Then every workload gets rationalised against the 5 Rs: rehost, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild or replace. Each is a different amount of money, and each carries a different order of risk.
Rehosting can accelerate the move to Azure, while modernising selected workloads can reduce legacy constraints and unlock more value from the platform.
Out of it comes a Solution Assessment Report: workloads sequenced, dependencies mapped, and licensing estimates covering whether existing Windows or SQL licences travel under Azure Hybrid Benefit.
That’s Assess. It ends with a ranked list of what deserves the money.
Build the right foundation before you migrate
The waves run that cleanly only because the destination was built first. For the manufacturer, the landing zone architecture and the cost model arrive with the assessment, before a single workload moves.
The landing zone buys visibility: who owns each resource, who can administer it and where its costs are allocated, from the first resource onwards. Azure Policy enforces tagging and naming from day one, so cost attribution works immediately instead of being reconstructed down the line. Identity and role-based access controls determine who can deploy, administer and view each part of the environment.
Connectivity, backup and disaster recovery are designed around the workloads before they arrive. Underneath sits the management group hierarchy, platform subscriptions, network architecture and security baseline, built with Terraform and CI/CD so the environment can be rebuilt or audited rather than remembered.
The operating model settles the rest: who monitors the platform, responds to alerts, approves changes, manages costs and owns recovery when something fails.
That’s Establish. It settles who owns what, who pays for it and how the platform will run.
Modernise the workloads that matter
The assessment produces a decision for each workload. The migration has to honour it. For the manufacturer, a straight rehost became a sequence, with the licensing position settled before anything moved rather than arriving in Azure as a monthly cost.
Workloads move in waves. The grouping follows what the business can afford to have offline on a given evening, which is usually a different list from the servers that happen to share a physical host.
Each wave carries a validated rollback plan, supported by CAB-aligned change documentation where applicable and customer acceptance testing before sign-off.
Then hypercare. Expert support over the environment immediately after each wave, because the week after cutover is when the problems testing didn’t surface turn up.
That’s Modernise. It decides how much of the old estate travels with you.
Then the stage with no completion date.
Benchmarking against the Well-Architected Framework helps keep cost, security, resilience and performance on track.
That’s Optimise. It answers whether Azure is still worth what you’re paying for it.
For the manufacturer, the assessment informed the target platform, landing-zone approach, licensing position and cost model before a single workload moved.
A Brennan Azure Consult covers the current estate, workload priorities, platform readiness and the most sensible next step.
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