As companies embark on their journey to cloud, one often overlooked component is the migration of their data. Neglecting the strategic impact of moving your data to the cloud undermines the value that you place on your data and ultimately drives up your operational expense. And data, and the insight that it provides, is a core component of your company’s ability to take advantage of business insight, competitive leadership, product differentiation, and the relationship you have with your customers.
Application migration strategies to the cloud abound from Gartner, IDC and others. I tend to like the 5R model from Gartner detailed here:
Rehost – moving the entire application to the cloud in an IaaS model framework
Refactor – moving the entire application to the cloud in a PaaS model framework
Revise – modify or rewrite the application to work on a cloud provider’s environment
Rebuild – complete rewrite of the applications functionality into a PaaS environment
Replace – purchase a SaaS solution that mirrors the original applications functionality
As important as these models are, the role of your data is often minimized or overlooked in their migration model. When I consult with customer on their cloud strategies, most often their focus is purely on the applications. Companies that have migrated quickly learn that beyond the unexpected cost increase of data in the cloud, sometimes 3x – 5x greater per GB, there is the unexpected consequence of access, control and governance of their data.
Access to your data, and the benefits you can derive from that data, is directly proportional to where that data lives. Where once all enterprise data lived within the confines of a corporate data center, now it’s highly distributed across multiple locations with various access protocols that create barriers to achieving heterogeneous data insight.
As you build out your cloud migration strategy, elevate the role of your data and consider how data plays in that migration. A hybrid approach to where the data resides is a critical component to your strategy. Options abound on strategies to placing your data in the cloud, near the cloud, or even implementing a segmented approach to location based on use, metadata, localization, and data sovereignty.
Where your data lives matters.
Enterprise Cloud 