The way we work and live has changed. Over the last several months, enterprises have had to shift their strategy from “physical first” to digital first and accelerate their digital transformation to enable remote productivity, reduce costs, or rapidly address new opportunities. In a digital first world, websites and web applications play a significant role in how customers interact with a business. To make a great first impression, companies are modernizing their web applications and data to the cloud for optimal performance, and saving money along the way.
Nearly a third1 of the world’s public websites are built on ASP.NET, and for good reasons; it’s fast, scalable, and secure. What if you could combine those benefits with the operational and financial benefits of the cloud? Microsoft Azure offers the only end-to-end application hosting platform to build and manage .NET applications, enabling significant cost savings, operational efficiencies, and business agility.
Here are three ways you’ll benefit from migrating your ASP.NET apps and SQL Server data to Azure.
Optimize costs with fully managed services that do more for you
Operating your .NET applications on a fully managed platform allows your teams to focus on what matters most by offloading apps, infrastructure, and data management to Azure. With our deep expertise in Windows, Visual Studio and ASP.NET, we have designed Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database from the ground up for .NET applications and the SQL Server Databases that power them. Simply put, there is no better place to build, host, manage, and scale your .NET applications.
“After having used Azure for the past couple of years, we don’t want to do it any other way, and the capital cost savings were just too compelling.” —Anand Kulanthaivelu, Solutions Architect for autoTRADER.ca
Use the power of built-in AI, with capabilities that surface savings opportunities for you. Azure SQL Database offers automatic tuning and adaptive query optimization to support peak performance. You can break down how increased traffic or upstream dependencies are affecting website response times with rich out of the box monitoring for ASP.NET applications in Application Insights.
Operate confidently with mission-critical performance and security
App Service and SQL Database can help simplify your operations while enabling you to operate confidently to address any business need. With App Service on Windows operating on an Internet Information Services (IIS) server in the backend and SQL Database sharing the same codebase with on-premises SQL Server, your developers and database admins can continue to use their familiar tools and processes to be effective from day one without a steep learning curve.
Azure .NET app hosting platform serves over 2 million websites and processes, 41 billion requests and 9 trillion SQL queries per day. Built-in auto-scaling quickly adapts to meet workload demand from these apps, ensuring that user experiences stay great. Cloud-native technology like Azure SQL Database Hyperscale removes many of the limits seen in other cloud databases, with a flexible storage architecture that grows as needed, up to 100 TB. Both App Service and SQL Database are available in all 60+ Azure regions, enabling you to deploy your applications closer to customers and meet local regulatory compliance needs.
“Hyperscale made it easy for us to support our growing workload and the dozens of microservices that power our core ecosystem.” —Andrew Wieck, Manager of Business Analytics, Clearent
Azure Security Center provides enterprise grade protection for all your Azure resources, so you can monitor all your applications and databases and receive recommendations to improve your security posture and threat protection. Azure SQL Database offers the broadest range of built-in security controls across T-SQL, authentication, networking and key management as well as advanced data security that proactively detects threats and vulnerabilities. You can protect applications with Azure Web Application Firewall, leverage Azure CDN to optimize performance or use Azure Front Door to route user traffic to the lowest latency backend, all while gaining built-in distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and global load balancing.
“We looked at moving to the cloud for better DDoS protection and lowered cost of operations for our apps. We have successfully migrated 200 apps to Azure, while using the App Service Migration Assistant to migrate 60 different .NET Apps. The Azure Migrate App Service Migration Assistant really simplified our migration journey by identifying any migration blockers and enabling us to migrate apps with just a few clicks. As an App development team, we really like the value proposition of Azure managed services for .NET Apps such as App Service and Azure SQL Database. We don’t have to worry about patching virtual machines or containers.” —Tim Fragakis, Director of Cloud Services, IT, Clover Imaging Group
Accelerate innovation and ship new features faster
Native integration between Visual Studio, GitHub, App Service and CI/CD enable developers to build and ship changes faster. Features such as remote and live-site debugging for ASP.NET apps let developers and operators diagnose issues in production environments and resolve them quickly, without impacting traffic.
Building on Azure opens the door to new features and services that provide off-the-shelf value to accelerate innovation. Developers can easily connect to new data sources and backend systems with 300+ pre-built connectors for Azure Logic Apps. Turn legacy web services into modern REST-based APIs by creating façades with Azure API Management, then innovate with many of the pre-built APIs for Azure Cognitive Services such as Speech, Text and Image processing. Add interactivity to your website with Azure Bot Service to serve customers more efficiently and deliver personalized results faster with Azure Cognitive Search.
Get started today
Azure offers easy-to-use tools with step by step guidance to help you migrate your apps and data quickly and efficiently. Use the Azure App Service Migration Assistant to perform readiness checks on your application and receive a detailed assessment that walks you through the migration process. Azure Database Migration Service provides a step-by-step guide to help you get to the cloud with near-zero downtime from multiple database sources. Go through this Microsoft Learn module for migrating .NET Apps to get a hands-on migration experience.
Learn more about building .NET applications on Azure and view our on-demand webinar to learn more about the tools you can use to migrate those apps to the cloud. For best-practice guidance and access to Azure engineers, consider the Azure Migration Program. If you are a Microsoft Partner, view our recent session at Microsoft Inspire to learn how you can build and grow your .NET Apps Modernization practice.
1Framework Usage Distribution on the Entire Internet (as of July 2020).