Why Companies Opt for a Cloud Migration — Part 1

Due to various factors such as cost-efficiency, flexibility and availability, organizations are trying to leverage the infrastructure from various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google and IBM. Within the CDW cloud practice, we are finding that organizations are taking different paths on their cloud journeys. Some organizations are in an early experimental stage as they try to understand the cloud’s various capabilities, while others are fully operating in the cloud.

Some organizations are even operating in a mixed or hybrid mode, where their workloads are inside both traditional data centers and in a public cloud.

Learn how CDW’s solutions and services can help you meet your cloud needs.

Whatever path they are taking on their cloud journey, one of the situations that may arise (at some point) is organizations migrating data from their on-premises environment to the cloud.

Moving Data from On-Premises to the Cloud

Enterprises accumulate a lot in their data centers over the years. The data could be related to normal business transactions, audit compliance or for keeping a backup of their workloads for the purpose of backup and disaster recovery.

There are many use cases for transferring data from an on-prem data center to the cloud. Here are a few of the most common examples:

• The customer wants to migrate its three-tier production application (consisting of the web tier, application tier and database) from an on-premises data center to the cloud. In this scenario, the customer wants to decommission its on-prem environment due to increased cost and the constant refresh required for their compute instances. Since the customer has accumulated data in their database, we need to find a cost-effective mechanism for transferring data to the cloud.
• The customer has been maintaining a large dataset in its on-premises environment using outdated virtual tape libraries. The solution consists of archiving data in a tape library and storing it in a separate physical facility provided by a third-party. This solution is not very flexible because of antiquated tape libraries and the numerous manual steps required for creating the archive and restoring data from the archive. It has been a long time since the customer has restored its data from the archive as a part of its disaster recovery exercise.
• The customer does not have enough capacity in its data center. Because of limited space, it can no longer add any infrastructure hardware (such as storage drives) in its on-premises environment. Due to corporate compliance and regulatory requirements, the customer is mandated to operate in its on-prem data center. Hence, this customer would need a quick way to expand the storage capacity in its data center in order to support its business growth.
• Because of increased labor costs, real-estate leases and antiquated infrastructure, infrastructure costs for operating a data center are increasing constantly. The customer finds that the cost of long-term storage in the cloud is a fraction of its on-prem cost.

More Data Migration Scenarios to Come

There are many other use cases that require data transfer from an on-premises environment to the cloud. In future blog posts, I will cover more of these details. CDW Professional and Managed Services can assist your organization on this journey by laying a foundation suitable for transferring data.