The speed hurdles are now history, but knowing two other truths can allay the fears of large-scale or wholesale migration.
Businesses that want to move their big data applications to the Cloud have, historically, faced significant barriers. Traditionally, the biggest obstacles have been bandwidth limitations in getting the applications to the cloud, and a lack of control over data, both in transit and at rest.
After data has been migrated to the cloud, enterprises do not necessarily have the same suite of tooling to manage it as they would with legacy systems. The business process differs as that data moves. And, of course, data-in-transit faces more potential exposure and is therefore more vulnerable.
However, with advancements in both internet infrastructure and secure data management solutions, the barriers that have held companies back from large scale migration to the cloud are now manageable.
With that said, here are three truths that need to be made known regarding large-scale cloud transformation:
- Nothing is “un-migrate-able” anymore
Until recently, companies that relied on performance-intensive and latency-sensitive applications were locked on-premises. Those looking to adopt the Cloud found there were areas where their adoption was getting blocked. A lot had to do with storage. In addition, the act of moving and re-architecting these applications was extremely complex, and there was a significant drop in performance once/if they reached the cloud.
With the benefit of years of cloud technology development, even the biggest and most complex enterprise workloads (such as lift-and-shift migrations of Linux and Windows applications, databases, HPC infrastructures, and applications, as well as enterprise web applications) can now move into the cloud and experience the same performance, if not better, than when they were on-premises.
This is great news, but how do you protect those critical applications? Read on to find out… - Data backup conversations need to happen in parallel with application conversations
Data backup and security is often not a conversation that happens in parallel with application and digital transformation conversations, but should be. The truth is, you cannot have an application without it being protected.
Not to sound dramatic, but how you treat your data will impact your business: if your data is vulnerable, your business is vulnerable.
Previously, backup or data protection would have been an afterthought. No one paid much attention to it until they needed it. Now, with threats like ransomware, it is much more of a concern than it used to be.
For CEOs that are concerned with security and increasing data privacy regulations, data protection is now top-of-mind. - To ensure regulatory compliance and cybersecurity, you need control and visibility over your data
Ransomware is growing increasingly worrisome as the frequency and ramifications of these attacks intensify.
Having security measures in place and employing appropriate levels of data backup are critical steps. As enterprises move to the cloud, having a backup solution built to span and protect data across their entire infrastructure becomes even more critical.
Equally important is having control over, and visibility into, the data. Data visibility takes data protection to another level and is something that most data management platforms cannot offer their clients.
Organizations can ensure complete security by having the same data protection engine, policies, workflows, REST APIs, and management and protection suite—whether they are protecting their on-premises data or data that is stored and running in the cloud.
There is a unified management control plane for data—regardless of whether it resides in the cloud, at the edge, or on-premises—and the protection of that data. In addition, organizations can benefit from robust solutions that interrogate data sets for things like PII, HIPAA data, and GDPR, and allow visibility into the backup data set.
The three truths point to the importance of not just data protection and data management of large-scale data that is migrated to the cloud, but also the importance of implementing ransomware detection and data classification, functions that are not typically supplied with just a data protection product.
