Migrating to the Cloud – Is Your Data Migration Strategy Feasible?

Organizations today are realizing the benefit of moving their applications and key systems into the cloud. Data migration to the cloud simplifies time-consuming and costly management, administration, and tuning activities. In fact, moving to the cloud helps improve performance, security, uptime, reduce costs, and to gain a competitive advantage.

Beyond Basic: The Challenges of Migrating the Data to the Cloud

Data migrations is a complex process that involves moving of schema, data, applications, and ETL from an organization’s on-site computers to the cloud. At times, legacy systems are replaced or an additional system is deployed alongside the existing applications.

Migrating to the cloud has its own challenges, which is further multiplied when data is stored and managed remotely, in multiple locations or by third party vendors. It requires special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data integrity, business continuity, and security.

Cloud Migration Strategy

A cloud migration strategy can help determine the feasibility of moving the on-premises workloads to the cloud.

Existing investments in infrastructure – If you are a big organization, you need to assess everything from hardware to applications to network architecture and beyond, to understand the effectiveness and viability of moving to the cloud.

But if you are a startup or a small organization, migrating to the cloud can be beneficial. You can be up and running with lower up-front costs and greater flexibility.

Application Portability in the Cloud – Performance, and portability of applications are two major issues that you need to check. A newer application may not face this issue, but for older applications that run on legacy systems, the move may be an issue. Lab testing is the only way you can identify how an application will perform in the cloud.

Virtualizing the Workload – It is easier to move workloads to the cloud, if the on-premises servers are virtualized or else the process takes longer than normal. To be effective and gain benefits from the cloud most organizations keep some resources on-premises while moving a part of it to the cloud.  The cloud functions as an extension of the on-premises network.

PROLIMs Diaspora for Data Migration 

PROLIM Diaspora, the cloud-based Data Migration Platform as a Solution, makes it easier to migrate workloads to the cloud. It also helps meet Data Quality Management, Data Archival and Data Reconciliations needs.

Conclusion

As an organization, you need to assess the pros and the cons of cloud migration. Migrating may not be cost-effective for you if you have invested heavily in an on-premises data center. But, you do not have to go “all in” with cloud migrations. You can benefit from migrating certain services to the cloud while continuing to operate other on-premises.