Andrew Sweeney
Whether you need to increase data storage, consolidate resources for efficiency, increase security, or build business continuity by moving to the cloud, any enterprise data center migration project is going to throw up challenges.
2020 saw growth in investments in cloud infrastructure, likely driven by the pandemic, as it overtook on-prem spending for the first time. But while cloud data center adoption is rising, enterprises continue to invest in on-prem for many reasons, including retaining control, or for security or governance. Gartner expects spending on data center systems to grow by 5.2% this year – representing the second highest growth in IT spending for 2021.
Whatever your strategy - moving from on-prem or the cloud, to on-prem, a public or private cloud data center, or implementing a hybrid solution – read on to find out how you can sidestep the pitfalls:
If you don’t have a clear picture of what you have or what you need, you’re likely to make errors in your future data center investments. To avoid doing this, you’ll need to compile an inventory of your assets, capabilities and requirements, working with stakeholders to understand:
Compile and analyze the data to decide how you move and what you invest in, to ensure it’s right for your enterprise.
Once you’ve decided how you are going to move you need to choose a premises or cloud provider that aligns closely with your business needs. Consider the following:
Making sure the show goes on as you migrate data is a key part of keeping your end user customers and leadership team happy. To avoid any breaks in service, you should spend time:
Protecting your data as you move it to the new environment is vital. To avoid data losses, you’ll need to:
To avoid issues later down the line, you need to ensure the data move is successful.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of a data center migration is staying within time and budget. With much of the work completed manually, you’ll have to think carefully about the resources you need for every step of the project:
Sound like a lot of work? Done manually it’s definitely going to drain resources. You’ll devote multiple team members to hunting out the data, consolidating it into spreadsheets, analyzing, compiling reports, and communicating with business leaders and other stakeholders. By the time you complete the discovery phase, your information will be old and likely contain errors, making it difficult to ever accurately right-size your investment. But, by choosing to adopt automation, you could drastically reduce the challenges and effort of migrating your enterprise data center.
ReadyWorks uses automation at every stage of the data center migration project to allow you to cut the many hours, weeks, and months you spend on manual tasks by:
Schedule a demo to find out how ReadyWorks can help you manage your data center transformation more efficiently.