As organisations across all industries prioritise cloud-first and cloud-only strategies, it has become crucial for business leaders to have peace of mind that their cloud-based ecosystems are effectively maintaining all services and business operations. If disaster does strike, systems, applications, and data must all be rapidly restored with the least impact on production environments, writes CHRISTOPHER ROGERS.
To maintain business continuity, organisations need to be protected against any potential disruption to the public or private cloud infrastructure itself. Data migration has become mission critical across all operations.
The answer is to replicate data and store it in a secondary location, in case one data centre experiences an attack or network outage. This means that businesses can easily and quickly retrieve their data by restoring from the secondary site and returning to business as usual.
With the rapid increase in frequency and evolution of cyber-attacks over the last couple of years, organisations are under increasing pressure to protect their digital assets. In fact, recent Check Point research shows that in 2022 cybe-rattacks surged by 77 per cent in UK organisations and 38 per cent globally.
Businesses in all industries must ensure their data migrations go as planned and eliminate risk. Yet while larger enterprises may have budgets and cyber teams to weather the storm, research reveals that nearly a quarter of UK small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) — equivalent to 1.3m companies — might go bust if they were forced to deal with the average cost of a cyber-attack.
Key migration challenges
However, it’s not only cyber attacks that threaten business continuity. Natural disasters, infrastructure failures – such as power and data centre outages – and human error can all potentially result in data loss and paralyse business operations. Data migration is critical to ensure the business’ data and applications can be quickly spun up in another secure environment, should a disaster event happen.
However, building a robust migration strategy itself doesn’t come without its risks and challenges. These can range from the impact of data loss during the migration process to compatibility issues arising from changed operating systems or unexpected file formats.
For example, among the biggest challenges encountered during the typical enterprise data migration process is the risk of losing critical in-house knowledge of each organisation’s applications. Since the average UK employee turnover rate is around 15 per cent, and with IT refreshes traditionally occurring every three to seven years, knowledge can all too easily be lost during handovers.
This can further elevate the time and costs of delivering the migration or even prevent the process from happening in the first place, creating a frustrating technology inertia.
IT leaders can also face confusion over which technologies to implement with the relentless pace of new ideas, concepts, and technologies coming to market – particularly about integrating their existing environment with new infrastructure or solutions.
With organisations increasingly implementing a cloud-first strategy, they must work out how to move to a completely new platform without suffering from serious outages or incurring significant cost overheads. And the vast range of cloud offerings available – particularly for hybrid cloud strategies – adds further complexity for cloud migrations.
And it’s always easier to get data into the cloud than get it out again, so it’s wise for organisations to approach a migration strategy with an exit plan in place.
A best practice approach to data migration
Whether it’s a data centre consolidation, cloud migration, or failover operation, to truly ensure business continuity, the organisation needs to be protected against any potential disruption to the public or private cloud infrastructure itself.
And this is where businesses must make sure they implement risk-free migrations with zero data loss. By replicating data and storing it in a secondary location, in the event of one data centre being the victim of disaster – or even if the network goes down – businesses can restore from the secondary site to resume business as usual.
Organisations can focus on removing the limitations that make many migration processes lengthy, expensive, and prone to errors. For instance, before a migration, testing as many times as necessary will validate success criteria and confirm operations at the target site. The need for speed in migrations is accelerated by automating the bulk of the process.
And by implementing continuous data protection (CDP) and replication, the lengthy migration window seen in many circumstances can be reduced from requiring days at a time to just a few minutes.
A holistic approach that delivers true workload mobility across competing platforms can ensure tech teams successfully navigate the common pitfalls and have total peace of mind when migrating their data, whether applications are stored on-premises or in the cloud.
- Rogers is Technology Evangelist at Zerto, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise company.
