Simplifying the cloud data migration journey for enterprises

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.

In this guest blog post, Kajol Patel, Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Data Dynamics, discusses digital transformation strategies for enterprises and how to utilize StorageX and the Azure File Migration Program to overcome common data migration challenges.

 

Data is foundational to any digital transformation strategy, yet enterprises worldwide struggle to find reliable and cost-efficient solutions to manage, govern, and extract valuable insights from it. According to a recent report published in Statista, the total volume of enterprise data worldwide increased from 1 petabyte (PB) to 2.02 PB between 2020 and 2022. This sizeable jump in volume indicates a 42.2 percent average annual growth in data over the last two years. The report also highlights that a majority of that data is stored in internal datacenters. Data storage and processing is costly and energy-intensive for enterprises.

 

Additionally, the cost of software for collection, analysis, and management of terabytes and petabytes of data residing in multiple storage centers adds to the expenditure. Breaking down siloes to extract real-time insights often ends up costing the enterprise exorbitant amounts of IT resources and revenue.

 

As unstructured data sprawl continues to grow, enterprises are turning to the cloud and embracing data as a strategic and valuable asset. By extracting useful insights from data, businesses can accelerate their digital journey by making data-driven decisions in real time to meet peak demand, grow revenue, and minimize storage cost. Enterprises such as Microsoft that offer cloud solutions give clients access to subscription-based remote computing services. It enables them to adjust cloud consumption to meet changing needs. As a possible recession looms, organizations that rely on the cloud are more likely to experience cost reduction as they effectively manage risk and compliance.

 

However, most enterprises face numerous challenges while migrating to the cloud: proprietary vendor lock-in, lack of migration skills, a labor-intensive process, and inadequate knowledge of data estate.

 

Top 3 data migration challenges for enterprises:

  • Lift-and-shift blind spots: Lack of knowledge of enterprise unstructured data estate may result in post-migration complexities such as security malfunction and non-compliance.
  • Lack of visibility: No clarity about what, when, and where around data may result in lack of storage optimization and delayed migration timelines.
  • Complexity of scope and scale: Lack of an integrated approach, governance, and skills, decrease in efficiency, low time to effort ratio, and other redundancies can cause chaos.

 

In a webinar hosted by Data Dynamics, Karl Rautenstrauch, Principal Program Manager, Storage Partners at Microsoft, spoke about the top challenges faced by enterprise customers while migrating to the cloud: “Over nine years of working closely with partners and customers in the field of migrating datasets and applications to Azure, we see a consistent theme of every enterprise in every industry being a little overburdened today – too much to do, too little time, and too few people, hence most of these enterprises are seeking automation. They want to ensure that they can engage in complex activities like moving an application comprised of virtual machines, databases, and file repositories in the simplest way possible with the least risk possible.”

 

He further emphasized the most consistent requirement for all customers he has worked with, regardless of size, was to migrate large data sets securely, quickly, and with minimal risk and disruption to user productivity.

 

Migrating file data between disparate storage platforms is always a daunting process. Microsoft recently announced the Azure File Migration Program to make customer data migration much easier and more secure. It helps address the customer's need to reduce the time, effort, and risk involved in complex file data migration.

 

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Speaking at the webinar, Rautenstrauch emphasized the value of on-demand compute and modern cloud services: “We have built a platform of services called Azure Migrate, which is freely available, and it has cloud-driven capabilities. These services help customers move virtual machines easily, databases, and now even containerized applications in an automated, risk-free fashion. One area that is neglected is unstructured data, so what we are going to do is address it in the Azure File Migration Program.”

 

The Azure Migrate hub offers many effective tools and services to simplify database and server migration but doesn't address the need for unstructured data migration. Hence, Azure File Migration Program is becoming a new favorite among enterprises possessing unstructured data sprawl.

Jurgen Willis, VP of Azure Optimized Workloads and Storage, states in his blog, “Azure Migrate offers a very powerful set of no-cost (or low-cost) tools to help you migrate virtual machines, websites, databases, and virtual desktops for critical applications. You can modernize legacy applications by migrating them from servers to containers and build a cloud native environment.”

 

Data Dynamics transforms data assets into competitive advantage with Azure File Migration

With over a decade of domain experience and a robust clientele of 300+ organizations, including 28 of the Fortune 100, Data Dynamics is a partner of choice for unstructured file data migrations. StorageX is Data Dynamics' award-winning solution for unstructured data management. The mobility feature of StorageX provides intelligence-driven, automated data migrations to meet the needs and scale of global enterprises. 

 

Having migrated over 400 PB of data encompassing hundreds of trillions of files, this feature is trusted and proven and delivers without losing a single byte of data. It provides policy-based and automated data migration with reduced human intervention and without vendor lock-in. StorageX has proven capabilities to multi-thread and migrates at the speed where you can move millions and billions of files in hours, making it one of the most scalable and risk-free data migration solutions. 

 

It can easily identify workloads and migrate data based on characteristics such as the least-touched files, files owned by specific users or groups, or hundreds of other actionable insights. StorageX Migration is a powerful migration engine that moves large volumes of data across shares and exports with speed and accuracy.

 

Here's a detailed comparative study of StorageX versus traditional migration tools.

 

Microsoft is sponsoring the use of Data Dynamics' StorageX as a part of the Azure File Migration Program. Enterprises can leverage this product to migrate their unstructured files, Hadoop, and object storage data into Azure at zero additional cost to the customer and no separate migration licensing.

 

Learn more about the Azure File Migration Program or reach us at solutions@datdyn.com I (713)-491-4298 I +44-(20)-45520800

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