BlakYaks rapidly establishes a clear understanding of the current-state environment and the requirements of the target Azure platform.

Source environment assessment

• On-premises data centres and server rooms

• Existing (brownfield) Azure environments

• Legacy or alternative cloud platforms (e.g. AWS)

Target Azure preparation and planning

• Ensuring target Azure platform is enterprise-ready

• Establishment of DevOps and orchestration capabilities to support future services

• Identification of critical non-functional requirements, including:

  • Security posture and CIS benchmarks

  • Regulatory and compliance obligations

  • Environment separation (e.g. production and non-production)

  • Networking, connectivity, and identity integration between environments

BlakYaks uses a combination of proven third-party tooling, proprietary automation, and structured processes to gather detailed insights into applications, workloads, and services that are candidates for migration.

All discovery outputs are consolidated into a central Migration DataMart, which becomes a key asset throughout the migration program. This provides a reliable foundation for planning and execution by capturing:

• Application, service, and workload relationships

• Ownership and accountability

• Application and service dependencies

• Network and firewall requirements (ports and protocols)

• Metadata gaps and remediation requirements

• Performance characteristics and workload requirements

• Business continuity and disaster recovery needs

Discovery activities are complemented by targeted stakeholder workshops to capture critical context that automated tooling cannot provide, such as business priorities, application roadmaps, future-state architecture, and strategic direction.

Using validated discovery data and stakeholder input, BlakYaks develops a detailed, application-level migration plan aligned to business priorities and risk tolerance.

Key planning activities include:

• Definition of migration waves and schedules

• Application, workload, and service classification, including:

  • Production versus non-production

  • Business criticality and impact

  • Priority and sequencing

• Migration sequencing based on application and service affinity

• Treatment planning, including:

  • Modernisation (e.g. PaaS, containers, serverless)

  • Re-platforming or re-hosting

  • Replacement or decommissioning

• Milestone planning with clear timelines and stakeholder communication plans

With detailed preparation complete, BlakYaks executes migrations in a controlled, predictable manner aligned to agreed maintenance windows and business constraints.

Execution activities include:

• Proactive communication and coordination with business and technical stakeholders

• Scheduling and re-scheduling to accommodate operational requirements

• Structured testing and validation to support confident business sign-off

• Execution of migrations within agreed risk and downtime tolerances

• Trusted rollback procedures for each application, service, and workload

Following migration, customers benefit from BlakYaks Hypercare, providing expert support during the critical stabilisation period (typically up to three months). This ensures issues are resolved quickly and services are fully optimised in the Azure environment.

Many customers choose to transition into the BlakYaks Azure Specialist Operations Service for ongoing operational support, continuous optimisation, and long-term platform management.