Enterprises worldwide often migrate to new cloud environments to harness greater flexibility, enhanced security, and cost efficiencies. However, the file migration process isn’t always straightforward. Numerous challenges can derail any cloud migration strategy. This blog post explores how to solve cloud storage migration challenges with an intelligent migration platform.
The Growing Need for Cloud Storage
With the exponential growth in enterprise data, the demand for cloud storage has skyrocketed. Companies need scalable solutions to manage vast amounts of data efficiently. A smooth transition to a new cloud vendor involves more than just lifting and shifting data. It requires unstructured data discovery and analysis, the ability to migrate files with speed, scale, and security, and minimal downtime to ensure business continuity.
Organizations can streamline the migration process by leveraging intelligent data management and migration platforms, ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud.
4 Common Enterprise Cloud Migration Challenges – And How to Solve Them
Organizations face many challenges involved in cloud migrations, especially when it comes to migrating unstructured data. But companies can tackle the most common migration challenges with an intelligent data management solution.
1. Discovering & Migrating Dark Data
It’s rare for an enterprise to have all of its knowledge worker content stored in one place. Employees often work out of multiple systems and store data on their desktops, in the cloud, on-premises file systems, in their emails, and in other line-of-business applications. Without intelligent data management platforms, gaining visibility into all of this unstructured data can be impossible. For a successful migration, organizations need to understand precisely how much data they have, where it is located, whether any of it is sensitive, and how much of it needs to be migrated at all. In many cases, most dark data is often stale or duplicate content that can be purged from the system. Performing an in-depth unstructured data discovery and analysis enables organizations to uncover those insights and make an intelligent data migration plan before simply moving files from the source to the destination.
2. Securing Sensitive Data & Managing Access Control
Migrating data without knowing its sensitivity or user access can expose organizations to risk. If organizations unknowingly migrate sensitive documents, like contracts or HR data, to a folder in a new platform without carefully governed access rights, employees could easily view and share private information. By using an intelligent data management platform, organizations can easily discover and classify their sensitive information, enabling migration strategies that mitigate the risk of a data breach. These platforms also outperform traditional migration methodologies by automatically maintaining or updating user and group permissions across platforms so that nobody has file and folder access rights that they shouldn’t have.
3. Ensuring Data Integrity
Employees are constantly updating, sharing, tagging, and moving files as they do their daily work. Beyond just the document’s contents, critical information is also stored within metadata and file properties. Examples may include file ownership, version history, created and last modified dates, classification labels, user permissions, and more. A typical cloud migration challenge is maintaining this information when moving files from one platform to another. However, doing so is critical to govern the quality and security of your data moving forward. Using an intelligent migration tool, organizations can transfer files intact, with full fidelity. As a result, existing data governance practices aren’t disrupted, and users can easily find and manage their data.
4. Migrating at Speed & Scale – Without Disruption
One of the biggest challenges of cloud migrations is simply the fact that migrations are disruptive by nature. Existing workflows, application integrations, and user habits will all require updating to the new system, no matter how carefully the data is migrated. But much of the pain of transitioning to a new system can be relieved by moving with speed and scale.
Like ripping a band-aid off quickly, minimizing the cutover period between cloud environments can make it easier for users to adapt to the new system without much disruption. With an intelligent migration tool that can rapidly transfer large volumes of data while maintaining file fidelity and user access, organizations can shorten the migration timeline and eliminate a lot of IT overhead and manual intervention. Additionally, cloud migration tools that can synchronize or “continuously copy” files help ensure that user data will be up to date when employees are moved to the new platform so they can continue working right where they left off.
Real-world Examples of Successful Cloud Migrations
Despite the numerous challenges of cloud migrations, successful migrations are just a matter of working with the right partner. Here are two examples of large organizations that solved their migration challenges and successfully transitioned to new cloud storage providers.
Indiana University: Solved Large Volume Cloud Migration Challenge
Indiana University, a Big Ten university with nearly 100,000 students, including more than 40,000 enrolled at their main campus in Bloomington, needed to migrate 3 petabytes of data to a new storage platform to avoid cost increases by their original vendor. The challenges they encountered along the way included differences between user permissions and native file types between their source and destination storage platforms and a compressed migration timeline to avoid costly renewal fees. By working with an intelligent migration platform, Indiana University was able to complete its cloud migration successfully and realize significant cost savings.
Forbes: Rapid Cloud Migration With No Disruption
Forbes, a global media brand known for its business magazine, sought a migration to consolidate multiple cloud storage systems to a single platform. However, after using traditional migration methods, they struggled to overcome their cloud migration challenges. Forbes required a scalable migration tool to rapidly migrate 15 terabytes of data before incurring renewal fees on their outgoing vendors. By choosing a strong partner and using an intelligent migration platform, Forbes completed its cloud migration in just 10 days. In the end, Forbes successfully consolidated their cloud environments and avoided unnecessary storage fees.
Explore additional cloud migration success stories to learn how you can solve your cloud migration challenges.
Best Practices for a Smooth Cloud Storage Migration
A successful cloud storage migration requires a well-planned strategy. We’ve compiled seven best practices that you can follow to ensure a successful cloud migration.
- Set appropriate cloud migration expectations
- Discover and analyze your data prior to migration
- Understand the business value and sensitivity of your data
- Fully assess your IT environment and existing integrations
- Determine your cloud migration approach
- Document an intelligent migration strategy
- Identify and prepare for common migration risks
We cover these best practices in detail in our free migration guide. Download the whitepaper now to begin planning your cloud migration strategy.
Start Solving Cloud Migration Challenges Today
In conclusion, solving cloud migration challenges requires a strategic approach and an intelligent platform. Intelligent migration platforms offer a comprehensive solution, leveraging automation and AI to discover and classify unstructured data, secure sensitive information, ensure data integrity, and minimize downtime. By following these best practices and partnering with a leader in unstructured data management and migration, enterprises can tackle these challenges and successfully migrate to the cloud.
Ready to take the next step? Explore DryvIQ’s intelligent migration platform and experience a smarter way to migrate.
