Brennan Data Migration Assessment – Cloud for Non-Profit

Microsoft Azure is a public cloud computing platform that allows you to quickly deploy infrastructure and services to support applications. The Azure platform provides a range of cloud services to support various workloads, including services for computing, data management, analytics, storage, and networking. Cloud infrastructure can be easily scaled up and down to meet your needs, ensuring you only pay for what you need and use. Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit aligns the capabilities of Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure, and LinkedIn to address common nonprofit scenarios —all based on the Nonprofit Common Data Model to unite disparate data sources.

Data is at the heart of most applications, so having a robust data platform is imperative. Hosting the data on premises can be expensive due to the cost of keeping the platform current. Moving the data to the cloud allows organisations to leverage a platform that offers security, flexibility and scalability yet still is cost effective, a significant benefit for Not-For-Profit organisations (NFPs).

The Data Migration Assessment – Cloud for Non-Profit service gives NFPs an introduction to the Azure data platform and the NFP Common Data Model, an analysis of their on-premises data footprint and a roadmap for how to move the data platform to the cloud effectively. As part of the assessment, we review your current environment, evaluate the benefits of migrating and modernising data workloads to the cloud, look at various options to host the data in the cloud, validate the correct Azure solutions that match your organisation’s requirements, and draft a roadmap for the migration highlighting the target architecture and a suitable migration process.

Core Activities

• Pre-Workshop Discovery Call. 90-minute pre-workshop discovery call to review existing data sources and understand how much data the NFP has and their data needs across the organisation.
• Review current data estate. Detailed review of data estate, data requirements and donor insights required.
• Introduction to cloud services for data and the NFP Common Data Model. Session to introduce Azure data platform, the various options that it provides to host data in the cloud, and the NFP Common Data Model.
• Dataverse, Data Warehouse and Understanding the best data Strategy. Innovation session on understanding how to leverage the latest technologies like Dataverse and Data Lakes to build a future-proof data environment that helps the NFP gain insights and value from their data.
• Target architecture design. High-level design of a potential target data platform on Azure.
• Migration roadmap. High-level overview of the process, tools and effort needed to perform the migration if the selected databases to the target environment on Azure.
• Data Strategy presentation. 60-Minute presentation to discuss the data migration plan so the NFP can understand the steps forward and modernise their data estate.