Database Migration to Azure

Migrating databases from on-premises to Azure delivers benefits including reduced operational overhead (no hardware management), built-in high availability and backups, and the ability to elastically scale compute and storage on demand. Organisations also migrate to satisfy cloud-first mandates, retire ageing data-centre hardware, or take advantage of advanced features like geo-replication and intelligent query tuning.

Database migration typically follows one of two broad strategies. An offline migration takes the source database offline, copies data to the target, and then switches applications to the new endpoint — simple but requires a maintenance window. An online migration uses continuous data replication to keep the target in sync with the source while it is live, cutting over with minimal downtime measured in seconds or minutes.