>What are you syncing to locally? Do you still have an on-premise server? Are you syncing files, SQL database(s), or both?

Sometimes, instead of opting for extra expenses to have a backup service being part of the agreement, it becomes possible to handle some of that manually. Thus, you can synchronize related files from the virtual data center to your local environment, resulting in a backup procedure if you want. Other reasons I could think of would be to obtain production files locally to manage some data for various business needs. This can also goes both ways. So, I can foresee a situation specific files are built locally but they have to be synchronized to the data center on occasional basis.

>In our case we need RDS. I'll have to find out if the providers can offer that in PaaS, or whether we need to go full IaaS to get it.

Yes, that would be interesting to know.

>Yes, IOPS seems to be an important part of Azure pricing (haven't looked at AWS yet). I think I'll test the existing server's IOPS to get an idea of what we need.

Ok

>I've seen this discussed as the "noisy neighbour" issue.

Yes, interesting terminology used in a friendly context.

>That's true with a lot of things, not just cloud IT :( It looks like it's possible to get free accounts to test with. But I'm concerned the free accounts get high priority/performance so they look good for the sale, and then once in production performance isn't as good.

Well, I see this as a good option. You will probably get that only in PAAS or lower. Back then, I wasn't able to benefit of such service for an IAAS setup.

>I was surprised at some of the Azure SLAs I saw - some offer only 99.9 or even just 99.5 uptime. Better uptime seems to require geographic redundancy etc.

Near perfection might not be good enough sometimes. This accounts for non-scheduled maintenances timeframe however. During normal operations, I would assume everything should be expected to run all the time. I'll check more on that.

>I'll check out firewall offerings once I find out if I can use PaaS or if I need IaaS.

I was able to continue to use Cisco ASA firewall. Its ASAv interface is basically the virtual equivalent. I was impressed.