SharePoint OnPrem to Azure Migration

Hi,

Recently I happen to work on a proposal for which we need to provide  multiple options to migrate a SharePoint 2007/2010 farm to Azure and also to SP Online to some extent. There are couple options got discussed and each one has it own pros and cons. Choosing the option and methodology is purely based on the business scenario what you are handling right now. I tried to detail the various options here,

Option 1 : SP OnPrem Upgrade - then to Azure

First Upgrade the On-premise previous version SharePoint farm to latest one (SP 2013) and then migrate the upgraded SP 2013 Vms to Azure as VM's.

Things to keep in mind

• SP 2007/2003 does not have a direct upgrade to SP 2013, it needs to be followed sequentially (2007 to 2010 and then 2010 to 2013). you need to plan an infrastructure setup and cost accordingly also the licenses
• This option will work out very well if your on-premise infra is virtualized and applications are running in VMs
• Copying Vm from On-premise to Azure for various products has various approaches  like VMware to Azure, Hyper-V to Azure..etc
• All customizations, orphaned/unwanted sites, content cleanup, 3rd party components compatability, site restructuring, taxonomy redfine..etc will be checked and fixed before we are moving the application to cloud.
• Data migration from Azure Vm to SP Online will be bit faster as compared to doing it directly from On-premise. Because the data transfer rate between the Microsoft  data centers will be fast as when compared to the On-Prem and SP Online
• Site to Site VPN tunnel can be established between On-Premise and Azure to fasten the vm copy process

Option 2: SP OnPrem to Azure and then upgrade

Move an existing On-premise vm to azure as it as (using microsoft acelerator tool for azure) first and then upgrade the Azure old version farm to SP 2013

Things to keep in mind

• As-Is Vm movement from On-premise to cloud and then an upgrade, so user will get the feel of SP 2013 use only at the end of the migration phase
• Immediate movement of an on-premise vm to azure will have an drastic change in your infrastructure cost
• Cloud enablement and cloud dependent solutions, 3rd party components surprises will come only after you start doing the SP upgrade in azure
• 2 environment need to be available in azure, i.e. SP 2010 farm and SP 2013 farm along with your typical ALM (Dev, Test & Staging) environments. 
• Maintaining the same kind of environment on-premise should be costlier than in Azure

Option 3 : SP Onprem to Azure using 3rd party tool
Move an existing On-premise SP any version application to Azure SP 2013 using any 3rd party data migration tool like metalogix, docave..etc

Things to keep in mind

You will have complete freedom to redfine the IA and taxonomy in the new platform and make use of the new features while defining the architecture itself

It is only data migration between On-prem to azure not an environment movement

Manually need to move all the custom components, 3rd party solutions to new environment and rebuild to make it compatible in SP 2013

3rd party migration tool is needed to do this migration, ofcourse the tool cost you have to keep in mind

Network latency and migration tool capability to transfer the data b/w on-prem and azure need to be considered and should do migration plan based on how much(GB) can be transferred in how much time (hr)

Happy Migration !