Migrate Data to the Cloud While Staying Grounded

Danny Smolders, Vice-President APAC, ExtraHop

Danny Smolders, Vice-President APAC, ExtraHop

In this age of digital transformation, off-premise data centers and hybrid solutions have become increasingly compelling options. Not only do these solutions allow organizations to operate with increased efficiency, resiliency, and agility, but it means organizations are able to easily reduce associated costs by up to 74 per cent.

Datacenter migration in the world of cloud-hosting and hybrid infrastructure can be daunting. Organizations are often afraid to take the leap to datacenter migration and rightly so. A poorly executed migration spells disastrous consequences, including loss off internal access to data, disruption to daily operations, loss of carefully accumulated data, and loss of employee and customer confidence and brand reputation. With so many dependencies and potential complications, it might seem challenging to guarantee a seamless end-user experience during the move, so it is no wonder that as many as 51per cent of organizations continue to be hesitant to implement this cost-effective strategy.

However, datacenter migration need not be painful and costly. It just comes down to visibility.

Before embarking on a migration, it’s critical to have an in-depth understanding of applications and their dependencies.

Observed, real-time application mapping is the most efficient, thorough, and accurate way to gain this understanding. This process also has the added benefit of identifying redundancies and inefficiencies to help improve overall performance once the migration is complete.

datacenter migration need not be painful and costly. It just comes down to visibility

Once the application and dependency mapping is complete, it’s time to put it to use. Migration planners should use this data to develop move groups and order, as well as notify line-of-business units of planned or potential outages. The systems are then taken down and brought back online in the new datacenter.

Real-time IT analytics play a critical role in delivering the visibility described above. Those that leverage network data are particularly effective for things like datacenter migration because they gather observed data about all systems, devices, and users, creating an up-to-the-second, accurate picture of what’s happening across the IT environment. Not only do these technologies passively identify and monitor every application and device, they automatically see all communications between them, providing an accurate picture of system dependencies.

Once the datacenter migration is complete, IT analytics can and should continue to play a role in IT and datacenter operations. Real-time IT analytics, particularly when combined with machine learning, is an important tool for ensuring the performance, availability, and security of critical applications. In addition to helping organizations identify and map the dependencies of applications and infrastructure, they also provide a continuous, up-to-the-second view of both, performance and communications. For example, IT organizations can use them to spot a bottleneck at the database tier or identify a potential security issue by spotting a spike in DNS traffic.

In conclusion, for a successful data migration, it is important to understand the process of transferring your data from the initial stage of careful planning the migration to the constant monitoring of your new datacenter after the migration. Making use of smart solutions will make datacenter migration seamless and accountable, allowing you to reap efficiency and productivity benefits. It is now more important than ever to take advantage of datacenter migration in your organization.