Migration Challenges: The Final Barrier to Cloud Adoption

Not long ago, the biggest concern for IT decision makers considering moving workloads to the cloud was security. That’s no longer the case. Today, the main obstacle to cloud adoption is different but familiar: the pain of migrating data.

Traditional data migration causes major headaches:

·      Hours or days of downtime while servers replicate and stakeholders verify functionality

·      Data loss and migration failures due to inadequate tools and inability to test

·      Key internal resources diverted from strategic initiatives

But migrating data doesn’t have to be painful. Purpose-built tools enable efficient data migration that doesn’t lead to downtime or create risks for data loss. A data migration project using tools that automate procedures and allow real-time testing can reduce the amount of downtime from hours or days to minutes or seconds.

Why migrate?

Public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are disruptive technology innovations that help businesses lower expenditures and stretch resources further with less infrastructure. But if businesses can’t migrate efficiently, it limits their ability to leverage new technology platforms and increases the risk of getting locked into a platform. That’s risky. What happens when the vendor sunsets the platform? Now there’s no choice but to migrate, or continue to run on an unsupported legacy platform.

This brings security into question as vulnerabilities emerge due to the absence of periodic software patches. Sooner or later, businesses will be forced to migrate as the platforms they’re on reach their end of life. So they’re better served by onboarding the necessary resources to perform efficient, non-disruptive migration for one-off projects, disaster scenarios and, ultimately, to protect long-term agility and competitiveness. 

According to a recent survey from Vision Solutions, here’s a list of the top 10 reasons why businesses migrate:

·      Replace unsupported hardware

·      Improve performance

·      Upgrade storage hardware

·      Consolidate servers

·      Adopt virtualization technology

·      Move to a different data center

·      Reduce cost of management

·      Migrate to a different platform

·      Adopt a cloud platform

·      Consolidate databases

Migration challenges

The allure of consolidation and cost savings are main drivers behind cloud adoption. But businesses are reluctant to move from one vendor to another due to the cost and complexity associated with moving data out of the cloud or between clouds.

About 66% of businesses postponed a migration due to concerns about the cost of downtime, according to the Vision Solutions study.

In many cases where businesses are reluctant to take on a large migration project, it’s because they’ve been burned in the past. Half of businesses performing migrations experience failures.

The biggest problem businesses face when performing data migrations is that they’re unable to start applications on the new server in the required timeframe. Today’s IT systems have complex dependencies. Even system architects can fail to grasp the complexity of the relationships between different enterprise components. If front-end and back-end servers can’t talk to each other like they used to, additional time and resources are necessary. Late discovery of issues often results in overtime for staff, downtime for users and lost productivity for everyone.

Should your clients migrate?

Here are some key questions you and your clients should consider when mulling a data migration project: 

·      What does a replacement system look like?

·      What inhibitors are preventing change?

·      Are there internal resources and knowledge to leverage?

·      What problems emerged in past migrations?

·      Can you currently move from any one platform to any other one, free from any hardware or operating system restrictions?

 About Carbonite Move

Carbonite Move Powered by DoubleTake is a flexible, purpose-built migration tool that protects business agility. It lets businesses perform any-to-any data migration with minimal human intervention and zero risk of data loss. Move replicates the entire server and, at cutover, it automatically turns the target machine into the production machine. Move talks to the DNS servers, updates records and automatically redirects to the new server. It’s like taking the hard drive out of one computer and putting it into another. Features include: 

·      Automated, real-time, byte-level replication

·      End-to-end testing with full reporting

·      Byte-level replication eliminates the risk of data loss

·      Full support for regulatory compliance

Not a Carbonite Partner?

Carbonite Partners have access to backup, disaster recovery, high availability and migration solutions to protect the full spectrum of customer environments. Giving your customers a range of solutions enriches revenue opportunities and ensures you support 100% of their environment while still working with a single data protection vendor.

Learn more about partnering with Carbonite and become a Carbonite Partner today.

Jon Whitlock is vice president of channel sales and marketing at Carbonite, a provider of cloud and hybrid data protection solutions for small-to-midsize businesses.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.