To help educational institutions (EDUs) build a robust and modern cloud foundation, Redapt and Microsoft recently hosted a technical workshop detailing Azure Landing Zones, SQL migration strategies, and cloud governance. Led by Jacob Edelblute, an IT infrastructure lead with over 10 years of experience in the educational and nonprofit sectors, the session provided a strategic blueprint for cloud modernization.
Building the Foundation: Azure Landing Zones
A successful cloud migration starts with a well-designed Azure Landing Zone governed by the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. Azure organizes resources through a management hierarchy that includes management groups, subscriptions, and resource groups, which work together to enforce identity and access controls via Microsoft Entra ID.
The industry standard for network architecture is the hub-and-spoke model. In this design:
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The Hub centralizes core services like Azure Active Directory, the Azure Firewall, and VPN or ExpressRoute connections.
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The Spokes are isolated subscriptions dedicated to specific workloads, keeping production and non-production environments securely separated while forcing traffic through the hub's firewall for inspection.
Navigating SQL Migration Strategies
When transitioning SQL workloads to the cloud, the right path depends on your application’s compatibility, modernization urgency, and the time available for code changes. The workshop detailed four primary migration avenues:
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Rehost (Lift-and-Shift): Moving SQL Server to Azure Virtual Machines provides a fast, like-for-like migration for legacy applications that cannot be easily altered.
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Refactor: Migrating to Azure SQL Managed Instance offers the automated benefits of Platform as a Service (PaaS) while maintaining high compatibility with on-premises SQL configurations.
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Re-architect: Upgrading to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale provides a fully managed, highly scalable database that can grow from 10 GB to 128 TB. It features near-instant backups and supports up to 30 named read replicas, making it ideal for future-proofing and modern native apps.
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Azure Arc: For databases that must remain in an on-premises data center due to specific security parameters, Azure Arc provides unified management and security updates from the cloud.
Unifying Data with Microsoft Fabric
For institutions looking to modernize their data, Microsoft Fabric serves as a serverless environment that centralizes data warehousing, engineering, and business intelligence onto a single foundation called OneLake.
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Fabric utilizes a Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) to progressively clean and refine raw source data into polished, business-ready metrics for artificial intelligence and reporting.
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Fabric's Direct Lake model heavily accelerates Power BI reporting; the presentation noted that Direct Lake dropped processing times from 11 hours to 15 minutes, or from 24 hours down to just one minute.
Governance, Security, and Disaster Recovery
Once in the cloud, strict governance and security guardrails must be established to mitigate risk and control costs.
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Governance and Cost: Azure Policy helps enforce organizational rules—such as preventing the deployment of expensive VMs or restricting deployments to specific regions—while resource tagging ensures precise tracking for cost management.
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Security: Cloud environments should leverage Azure Key Vault for certificate protection, Microsoft Defender for Cloud for compliance monitoring, and Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for time-bound, just-in-time administrative access.
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Disaster Recovery: It is crucial to distinguish standard Azure Backups (used for development cycles or accidental deletion) from Azure Site Recovery. Azure Site Recovery handles full disaster recovery by replicating environments across regional pairs (e.g., East US to West US) to meet specific business Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) requirements.
Schedule a Strategy Call with Redapt
A successful cloud journey begins with understanding your institution's goals, assessing your current capabilities, and building a strong business case for migration.
Redapt can help you define your roadmap and decide whether to start with a proof-of-concept pilot program or proceed directly to a full migration. Furthermore, Redapt is highly experienced in navigating Microsoft funding vehicles, such as ECIF and Azure Accelerated, which may help fund your assessments or migrations, alongside maximizing nonprofit and academic EA pricing.