Frequently asked questions

Microsoft Assessments is a free, online platform that helps customers in a self-service online manner evaluate their business strategies and workloads, and through curated guidance from Microsoft, they are able to improve their posture in Azure.

Microsoft Assessments is a completely free, open platform available to anyone who has an interest in evaluating their business strategy and workloads to improve their posture in Azure.

Cloud provides a new computing and technology paradigm for customers. Assessments will enable customers to quickly and confidently identify ideal approaches to the Cloud, whether its organization governance or tactically enabling a workload on Azure. Assessments provide pragmatic recommendations based on the customer’s needs. Assessments create a number of new decision points and potential paths to proper guidance. By providing answers to fundamental questions, the content options can be narrowed, allowing the reader to more quickly find guidance that better fits their specific scenarios. Assessments are self-service so that customers can review recommendations at their convenience.

Yes, registration is required in order for Microsoft Assessments to give you personalized recommendations, sessions, checklists, and other platform features.

Cloud Journey Tracker provides guidance and detects whether an organization has taken a comprehensive approach to their digital transformation. It covers business, people and technology decisions to be taken and expected outcomes, and provides clarity on how the organization should approach cloud adoption.

Governance Benchmark drills down on governance specific topics to assess current and expected governance state for the customer. It relays top priority areas for customers and provides recommendations on further steps to focus on to create an initial governance roadmap.

Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review helps customers identify gaps in any of their workloads across five pillars: resiliency, scalability, devops, security, and cost. The output from this tool will provide customers curated guidance that will help them bridge the gap in their architecture.

Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool helps customers prepare for a scale migration. Preparation is critical to ensure your project is executed smoothly and that you realize intended benefits.

Cloud computing platforms, like Azure, tend to be less expensive and more secure, reliable, and flexible than on-premises servers. With the cloud, equipment downtime due to maintenance, theft, or damage is almost non-existent. You can scale your compute and storage resources—up or down—almost instantly when your needs change on Azure. Also, you typically pay only for the services you use, which provides a level of convenience and cost-control that’s almost impossible to achieve with on-site infrastructure. Microsoft provides competitive pricing, use of any open source OS or language, enhanced proactive security, and allows customers to leverage their existing tools and knowledge. Learn more about Azure here: https://azure.microsoft.com/overview/

Microsoft assessments are free and cover specific topics that help customers identify and accelerate their cloud journey. Many 3rd party services provide assessments that may be more in-depth or broader with complete end-to-end service offerings.

3rd party assessments generally require an expert to act on the recommendations. Microsoft assessments are designed for a self-service OR supported implementation. Each recommendation is aligned to prescriptive guidance to act on the recommendations with, or without, 3rd party support. This approach makes Microsoft assessments a complement (not competition) to 3rd party assessments.

After completing the assessment, you will be taken to the results page. This page will provide you with an overall score helping you benchmark where you are on your journey. It also provides curated next steps and tailored recommendations per category with links to additional documentation to read. You can share your assessment’s results on social media platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Email) as an opportunity to create a comprehensive picture of your current strengths and opportunities for growth. The goal is to help you determine what concrete actions you can take to improve your journey.

Take a look at the image below to explore the features of the results page.

Yes. If you're logged in, Assessment results can be share with with those you trust. Likewise, Assessment results can be exported to a CSV file; which also requires being logged into the platform.

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To help customers quickly, consistently and confidently understand their cloud journey and provide recommendations to help customers with their next steps.

Cloud Journey Tracker provides a general overview on how the organization should approach cloud adoption.

Governance Benchmark drills down on governance and relays top priority areas for customers.

Azure Architecture Review helps customers with workloads specific gaps in their architecture.

Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool to prepare for a scale migration to Azure is executed smoothly and that you realize intended benefits

Azure Advisor and Microsoft Migration tools like Azure Migrate are each examples of the types of tools that may be included in the prescriptive guidance at the end of the assessment. The complimentary aspect of these assessments is their ability in aiding the customer in finding and applying the most appropriate tools to meet their specific needs.

Microsoft Migration tool provides customers the ability to migrate workloads to Azure while assessments can help identify which workloads to move first.

If you encountered one of the above issues and/or your issue isn't resolved by the fixes provided in our Troubleshooting guide, report an issue to notify our team.

To report an issue, please use the link provided on the page of the unit where you are encountering the problem.