Introduction

Moving to cloud is an essential step for enterprises looking to leverage the benefits of security, innovation (AI), scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. To help unlock these benefits migration or modernization to Azure is critical for reasons such as colocation of IT assets. A crucial part of this transformation is understanding the current state of your IT infrastructure, including workloads, applications, and their interdependencies. Cloud migration is most effective when you can decide, plan and execute it holistically focusing on applications rather than focusing on individual servers or workloads in isolation.

In our endeavour to both simplify and enrich your cloud adoption journey, we are evolving Application awareness in Azure Migrate that we introduced last year with features summarized below.

Overview 

“The new design of Azure Migrate is much more intuitive, it allows us to group workloads into applications and track them throughout the migration journey. The Business Case Generator is a true game changer, providing insights that are ready for presentation at Leadership meetings. Azure Migrate continues to improve, making the execution of migration programs more seamless, faster, and secure. It has been an invaluable tool for our customers who are in the path of migrating to Azure”

–        Karthik Balachandran | Architect | EY

Azure Migrate delivers a major evolution in cloud migration capabilities with application awareness. Here are key new features and why they matter: 

1. Multi-Server Dependency Mapping – Provides a holistic view of application topology, so you understand all server interactions before migrating. This reduces risk by ensuring no server is left behind and dependencies are respected during cloud transition.


2. Software & Security Insights– Offers built-in intelligence on software inventory and vulnerabilities (e.g. highlighting outdated software and missing patches). This helps improve your environment’s security and stability as part of the migration journey, benefiting IT admins and security teams. 


3. Application definition & import– Allows you to treat applications as first-class citizens in Azure Migrate (not just tag groupings). You can create and manage app groupings easily, enabling a shift from managing individual workloads to managing whole applications in your migration project. 


4. Application migration or modernization RoI – Allows you to identify investments required in respective migration strategies as well as savings that would accrue as application are moved to Azure.


5. Application Assessments– Delivers holistic migration plans per app, including recommended strategies (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor), target Azure services, sizing, cost estimates, and readiness checks. This empowers cloud architects to make informed decisions with an application-level focus. 


6. Code insight integration –


7. GitHub Copilot assessment – Enables a developer-driven assessment loop by incorporating GitHub App Modernization Assessment reports. This tightens collaboration with dev teams and can dynamically adjust migration recommendations (e.g., flagging apps that need refactoring). 


8. CAST Highlight– Brings code-level analytics at scale into the migration plan. By importing CAST’s code scan results, you can identify technical debt and required code changes upfront, ensuring the recommended cloud approach truly fits the app’s codebase. 


9. Wave Planning with 1P Tool Integration– Provides a planning and execution framework to migrate in phases and launch the appropriate migration tools for each component seamlessly. This ensures end-to-end coverage – from migration scheduling to real-time execution – all within Azure Migrate.

Capability deep dive

Identify your applications using multi-server dependency mapping and subsequently define them

One of the first steps in cloud migration planning is identifying application boundaries and dependencies. Azure Migrate’s new multi-server dependency mapping provides a rich visualization of how servers communicate with each other in your environment. This goes beyond the single-server dependency view of the past – now you can visualize an entire datacenter’s topology in one view.

When you discover your on-premises environment, Azure Migrate’s agentless dependency analysis automatically begins mapping connections. It even measures connection strength, helping distinguish steady, critical communication from ephemeral connections.

You can subsequently define applications, and assign metadata such as Name, type – Custom or Packaged (Commercial off the shelf), Criticality, Complexity (based on the number of dependencies), etc.

Additionally, you can export your discovered inventory, assign application names in a spreadsheet, and import it back to quickly create many application grouping.

You are free to refine or correct groupings, too. If during analysis you realize a server or workload was grouped incorrectly, simply update the application to add or remove that member (with no need to re-run discovery). Deleting an application grouping will not delete the underlying servers; it just removes the logical app wrapper, so you can reorganize safely as needed.

Now, you can plan migrations by application units rather than individual workloads. This leads to more predictable outcomes (since all interdependent pieces move together), and it eliminates guesswork that used to come from manually correlating server relationships.  

Proactive Software and Security Insights 

Migration is not just about moving workloads – it’s an opportunity to remediate and improve what you have. The new Software and Security Insights surface critical information about your IT estate early on, so you can address potential issues before migration. 

Once your inventory is discovered, Azure Migrate now highlights: 

1. Software Insights:The portal flags certain software or OS components that might need attention or have cloud-friendly alternatives. For example, it might detect that some VMs run outdated middleware or unsupported OS versions. The tool provides recommendations for replacement or upgrade – e.g. suggesting you Repurchase a legacy product through Azure Marketplace or move to a SaaS solution for that functionality. This helps you plan modernization (repurchasing or upgrading software) as part of the migration project, rather than carrying technical debt to the cloud. 

2. Security Insights:Azure Migrate also integrates with security monitoring to detect vulnerabilities and missing updates in your servers. More importantly, it advises how to fix them: e.g. enabling Microsoft Defender for Cloud to address vulnerabilities, and using Azure Update Manager to apply pending updates. In essence, you get a mini security assessment alongside your inventory. 

These insights empower IT admins and security teams to tackle risks as part of migration planning. Rather than “lift-and-shift and then fix later,” you can remediate issues in parallel with migration, leading to a more secure and optimized environment on Azure. 

RoI for modernizing applications

We are bringing in updates to Azure Migrate Business case to help ascertain the value you stand to gain by modernizing your applications – Custom or Packaged, as well as providing spend analysis across recommended migration strategies – Rehost, Replatform and Refactor.

Holistic application assessments covering Infra-Data-Web tiers

Application assessment builds on Azure Migrate’s existing server, database and webapp assessments, to give a migration game-plan for an entire application. 

It analyzes each component and then recommends

1. An overall migration strategyamong Rehost, Replatform and Refactor, for the application under consideration.


2. Migration readiness, and blockers that need to be addressed for respective strategy


3. Target Azure Services and SKUs for workloads comprising the application


4. Monthly cost estimates to run the application on Azure


5. Migration tooling recommendations per workload comprising the application.

Instead of piecemeal workload assessments, Cloud architects get a unified view per application – making it much easier to prioritize and plan. For example, you might discover that one application is an easy rehost (quick win), while another would clearly benefit from refactoring to eliminate costly components. Application assessments surface such insights with data, so stakeholders (including application owners and developers) can agree on a path forward with confidence. Ultimately, this leads to high-confidence migration plans and minimizes surprises during execution. 

Improve analysis with Code-Level Insights from Github Copilot assessment and CAST

Most times, whether an application can be easily Replatformed or needs Refactoring depends on the application’s source code. Hence, we are bridging the gap between infrastructure and application development realities and are offering Integration with code analysis tools – GitHub Copilot assessment and CAST Highlight – to incorporate code-level insights into Azure Migrate’s recommendations.

Talking about GitHub copilot – it is an indispensable tool for the application development. Developers can identify changes required in the code bases of their applications to make them ready for modernization to PaaS services such as AKS, App Service, etc.

The cloud architect running Azure Migrate application assessment can request the application developers to ingest the code change insights from GitHub copilot assessment into Azure Migrate assessment. Once this report is ingested, you’ll see the Azure Migrate assessment refine its recommendations conclusively – such readiness, effort to make the code changes, migration strategy – depending upon whether the code changes are minimal or significant.

Similarly, at-scale/ portfolio level code analysis performed using CAST Highlight, a prominent software intelligence platform, can be imported into Azure Migrate to improve the assessment recommendations.

In practice, this means Azure Migrate will know if the code has, say, outdated libraries or many hard-coded dependencies that make cloud migration harder. Overall, the integration of code insights leads to more realistic migration plans and smoother hand-offs between cloud infrastructure teams and dev teams. 

Wave Planning and Integrated Migration Execution 

After discovering applications, assessing them, and incorporating any code insights, you’re ready to migrate or modernize – but large migrations often happen in phases. That’s where the new Wave Planning feature comes in. Wave planning in Azure Migrate helps you organize and sequence the actual migration execution in waves or batches, plan the migration activities and execute using integrated first party migration tools and track the end-to-end migrations; thereby providing a single place where different users – Cloud architects, developers, application owners, etc. can collaborate and coordinate through the migration journey.

If your strategy for an application (or a particular server in the application) is Rehost (lift-and-shift to Azure VMs), Azure Migrate will use its built-in Server Migration capability. You can start the replication of that server to Azure right from the wave plan.

If your strategy is Replatform or Refactor and involves migrating data, the wave plan can redirect you to Azure Database Migration Service (DMS). All these integrations mean you can coordinate multi-step migrations from one place. Wave planning is aware of various target strategies and helps orchestrate them, so cloud administrators don’t have to juggle separate tool interfaces for VMs vs. databases vs. web apps. 

As each part of a wave completes, Azure Migrate updates the wave status for Rehost scenarios and users can manually update the status’ for Refactor or Replatform scenarios where some steps may take out of band. 

Interested in trying the new feature set and experience?

All the above features are available in Azure Migrate now (in preview as of 7^th November, 2025). Just create a new Azure Migrate project and you’ll be greeted with the new interface. From there, you can start defining applications and exploring these capabilities with your own data.

About Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s free platform for migrating and modernizing to Azure. It provides IT resource discovery, assessment, business case analysis, wave planning, migration, and modernization capabilities in a workload agnostic manner. You can run and monitor your migration/ modernization journey from a single, secure portal.

Currently, Azure Migrate’s application aware experience supports the discovery of following workloads: Windows Server, Linux Server, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, .NET webapp on IIS, and Java on Tomcat running on various platforms including, VMware, Microsoft, Bare-metal, AWS EC2, GCP CE, and Xen.

Further, it supports assessments and wave planning for Azure VM, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, App Service Code, App Service Containers, and Azure Kubernetes Service. Last, it supports in-line Lift and Shift migration to Azure VM and Azure Local.

Note: MySQL discovery and assessment is available in the classic experience only