“The cloud” has been a buzzword for years now, and for good reason. Global data center traffic is projected to triple in the five years from 2013 to 2018, reaching nearly 9 zettabytes annually by that time. What’s more, a fast-growing segment of data center traffic is made up of cloud traffic, which is expected to account for more than 75% of data center traffic by 2018. So, why is everyone moving to the cloud, and how can you ensure success when you do?
Data migration to the cloud needs to be considered and backed with a smart strategy.
Businesses of all sizes are shifting to distributed infrastructure and cloud tools, whether or not they need to move mass quantities of data. The hardware powering the cloud continues to improve, as does security, and it only makes sense for businesses to explore their opportunities for cloud file storage and apps.
The Cloud Is a Customizable Collection of Services
“Cloud” is a convenient term that covers a lot. Most fundamentally, it refers to data distribution over a wide area network. Clouds can be private, public, or a hybrid of both. Most individuals and organizations use the cloud all the time, whether they realize it or not. But the cloud takes on more complex meaning when you start talking about data migration in addition to cloud file storage.
In other words, “cloud computing” isn’t a monolithic entity, but a spectrum of services that can be made to complement each other and scale with ease. Clouds are now considered fundamental to most industries’ IT-based solutions. Yet cloud projects continually evolve as new use cases emerge, as hardware improves, and as needs change.
Can You Measure ROI on Moving to the Cloud?
You absolutely can measure return on investment for cloud file storage and data migration to the cloud, but how you do so depends on your specific use case. For some companies, disaster recovery alone is an important enough consideration to switch to cloud file storage, while for others, the cloud makes the most sense in terms of cost for testing and development work. Still other businesses may predict swift ROI from data migration to the cloud as a way to consolidate data centers. And as cloud security continues to improve, more organizations consider offloading of data security to be enough of a reason to change to cloud file storage.
A Ponemon study of data breaches from 2014 calculated that the cost per lost or stolen record continues increasing, representing higher costs associated with data breaches. The study concluded that moving workloads to secure cloud-hosted architecture reduces the risk of leakage of sensitive data. The major breaches that have happened over the past few years (Target, Sony) have not happened within a cloud provider environment.
Possible Cloud Migration Scenarios
Your data migration should be uniquely tailored to your needs.
Your cloud data migration and that of your competitors may be quite different. For example, as appealing as flash is, “all flash, all the time” is only right for a fraction of organizations right now. Costs involved with 100% flash are prohibitive in many cases, and software can go a long way in bridging the gap between flash and existing disks (or tapes for long term storage in some cases).
Cloud file storage tiering still has a strong case too. Often, organizations believe they’ll do best with a single high-performance storage solution, but data volumes are growing fast enough that the folly of this approach becomes real all too soon. As data volumes skyrocket, tiering again and again becomes necessary. Typically, flash adoption for the fastest cloud file storage needs is supplemented by disk and tape storage in varying combinations.
Challenges Associated with Moving to the Cloud
Since the services used for a particular data migration project differ, so do the challenges associated with them. But there are some rules of thumb that can help you predict what kinds of challenges your organization will face. If, for example, your major use case is cloud file storage as a service, were you to switch providers you would be faced with downloading all those files to physical hardware, and then uploading them to your new cloud provider. Whatever your main use case, it’s smart to think through some worst case scenarios and your options for handling them.
If you’re interested in delving deeper into the hows and whys of cloud file storage performance, we invite you to download our free white paper “Getting Great Storage Performance in the Cloud.” Learn how you can do the planning and analysis to ensure that data migration to the cloud never compromises your performance.
For more information on transitioning to the cloud, download our white paper “Getting Great Storage Performance in the Cloud.”
