Is migrating to a cloud-ready platform keeping you up at night?
Doug Jones
With an unprecedented rise in remote workers, data usage and consumption are growing exponentially. This new data demand puts tremendous strain on outdated legacy storage environments, causing data access, security, and performance issues. Like many companies today, you recognize that a hybrid cloud solution model for your data storage would provide the agility, flexibility, and performance you need to rein in rapidly growing data usage and adjust to new business demands quickly.
You know it’s time to upgrade your legacy storage system, it’s key to your IT transformation strategy, but you’re concerned about the disruptive impact a large-scale migration could have on your business processes and the toll it could take on your IT team…the prospect of executing what can be a complex, time-consuming, costly, and potentially risky data migration is giving you nightmares!
According to Gartner, 50 percent of data migration projects exceed budgets and timelines or could harm the business due to a flawed strategy and execution. So how do you avoid being just another statistic and one of the 50 percent? Let's take a look at what you need to do to confidently take up the task of a data migration.
Plan, plan, plan then prepare
There is a common misconception that a data migration is simply moving data from Point A to Point B—the reality is almost always the opposite. Lack of a clear migration plan and a poorly understood and undocumented legacy systems are typically the greatest causes of data migration risk and failure. To avoid wasted effort and costly disruption to your business, ensure you have a data migration plan:- Clearly define the business objectives for your migration, establish a set of standards for proactively identifying key risk factors, and clarify costs, budgets, and timelines to all concerned.
- Don’t make assumptions about your data – analyze data complexity to determine types of data in your environment and identify dependencies and define the right migration pathway to the new storage system. Also assess your data quality by identifying data inconsistency, incompleteness, and duplication. Be prepared to clean data before you begin a migration.
- Establish security and compliance requirements by defining standards and rules for maintain data quality and security during and after the migration.
- Identify the migration tools and best practices that are best suited to your environment and the expertise needed to use them.
- Define test and validation processes - document cutover and test plans including contingency plans to ensure during the migration process that the security and integrity of your data is maintained and avoid data loss.
Success may mean not going it alone
Don’t automatically assume that your IT staff has the availability or the expertise to plan and project manage a large-scale data migration. Many IT teams are spread too thin, focusing on business-critical activities, or they simply don’t have the specialized know-how to handle a complex migration project. This is where a good partner comes in. A strong professional services partner, with demonstrated expertise in large-scale data migrations, can act as a bridge between your functional and technical teams and provide the guidance you need to create and execute a successful migration strategy. They can help you avoid falling behind before you even start, reduce risk and disruption to your business, ensure your migration project meets expectations, and deliver to your IT staff with the knowledge to keep your new system up and running for the future.Rest easy with NetApp Professional Services as your trusted partner
If you’re considering a data migration, NetApp‘s deep expertise in helping customers move forward on their cloud journey from outdated legacy systems to a new NetApp ‘cloud-ready’ ONTAP environment, is second to none. Our data migration services experts use field-proven best practices and tools to help you plan and execute a successful data migration strategy that mitigates operational disruptions, reduces risks of costly overruns and delays, and gets your systems into production quickly, while enabling you to take full advantage of NetApp ONTAP efficiencies and capabilities, faster. And when you’re ready to take that next leap to the public cloud, our cloud migration specialists can simplify and accelerate the transition of large-scale and virtualized workloads from the data center to the cloud so you can confidently and securely move your business-critical workloads to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP® for AWS, for Azure, or for Google Cloud.Visit the NetApp v. Dell page for more information.
Doug Jones
Doug Jones is a senior product services manager with NetApp and leads portfolio strategy for Migration Services. He holds an MBA from Duke Fuqua School Business in General Management and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University. He lives in the greater Asheville, NC area.
