Lee Field, head of IT consulting and complex solutions (APAC) at Verizon, continues to discuss cloud migration and related challenges faced by enterprises. Read “How to Migrate Your Enterprise System to the Cloud” to get up to speed.
After years of intense hype and implementation, cloud technology is now delivering benefits back to enterprise organizations, helping change the ways companies innovate and how IT, software and services are delivered.
In my last article, I talked about key steps to take when preparing to migrate enterprise data to the cloud. Now, I want discuss what actually happens to that data during the relocation itself, and what organizations need to do to ensure that a migration is successful.
During a server migration, either the data that resides on the server is replicated or the entire virtual machine is exported from one virtual environment to another cloud service provider. The big challenge here is the ability of the service provider to support, monitor and manage the data. If you have a service provider that doesn’t have the necessary expertise, chances are that you could be faced with an unsupported or unoptimized image. This could lead to performance and compatibility issues. In addition, links to dependent services or hardcoded parameters can frequently affect ease of migration.
Transition Challenges
The migration of applications or data — including application/data restores from backup, use of migration tooling and application re-installs — can be tricky. First, understand that application re-installs can be costly and take time. It’s important that the actual configuration is taken from the existing production estate, as it’s possible that undocumented changes could have crept into the system at some point. If you’re migrating or replicating data while testing is taking place, the cutover can be complex. Lastly, migration tooling is often viewed as the simplest method but it can get costly, and is not necessarily required for all workloads.
Cloud has lowered the barriers to market for startups at a rate unseen since adoption of the Internet itself. It may be true that the majority of organizations come to the cloud with a legacy application estate in place, but effective migration can help enterprises develop an ‘agile IT’ approach — focusing on innovation, accelerating speed-to-market and delivering value and revenue back to the business.
Visit Verizon Enterprise Solutions cloud portfolio to learn more about how to choose the right cloud for your enterprise organization.
