The conventional wisdom is that cloud adoption is significant and growing rapidly – and, in this case, the conventional wisdom is right:
- The vast majority of organizations use public and private clouds
- The leading on-premises email platform, Microsoft Exchange, is being migrated to the leading cloud-based email platform, Office 365
- Cloud infrastructure providers are largely replacing on-premises solutions because they offer lower costs and greater efficiencies, and
- The typical larger enterprise uses more than 1,000 cloud applications.
As migration to the cloud continues, so does the need to migrate data from on-premises platforms to the cloud and between cloud providers. However, this is not a trivial undertaking. Consider:
- Not everything should be migrated to the cloud. Migrating everything to the cloud is not only unnecessarily expensive, but it also increases the risk that data will somehow be compromised and can consume valuable resources, staff as well as put major strains on your networks and bandwidth. While some decision-makers believe that everything should be migrated, it is usually not necessary.
- There are lots of decisions to be made. Decision-makers that are contemplating a cloud migration must decide what, how and when to migrate – as well as what not to migrate. Moreover, they must decide how to manage data that is not worth migrating but must be retained.
- There are lots of problems to solve. Organizations that want to migrate data to the cloud must ensure the integrity of the migrated data, decide how they will continue to access data that is not migrated but retained, and understand how they will migrate very large volumes of data reliably and economically.
- Tape archives must be properly managed. The decision about tape migration is an essential one. Most organizations have large quantities of tape storage for backups and long-term archival of strategic information. However, the issue of tape migration is complicated by the fact that some data on tape in some cases may no longer be accessible due to the age or formats of the systems they were stored in, or the tape source may no longer be supported or available.
- Regulatory issues are critical. Regulatory compliance must be maintained when migrating content to the cloud or any other venue, especially while the migration is in process to ensure full chain-of-custody is maintained.
- Using a single vendor for migration offers benefits. A single vendor with expertise across all types of data migration offers a number of advantages compared to using several different point providers that manage only a piece of the migration effort.
ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER
This white paper was sponsored by Trusted Data Solutions.