Azure Strategy and Implementation Guide for IT Organizations

Each organization has a unique journey to the cloud based on its own starting point, its history, its culture, and its goals. This document is designed to meet you wherever you are on that journey and help you build or reinforce a solid foundation around cloud application development and operations, service management, and governance. At Microsoft, we have been on our own journey for the past decade, and over the past years we have learned important lessons by developing our own internal and customer-facing systems. At the same time, we've been fortunate to share the experiences of thousands of customers on their own journeys.

This document is designed to share those experiences and distill them into proactive guidance. You do not need to follow these recommendations to the letter, but you ignore them at your peril. Our experience has shown that a careful approach to these topics will speed you along on your organization’s journey and avoid well understood pitfalls.