For all the benefits of the public cloud, many large-scale enterprises are still reluctant to modernize their IT and migrate their workloads. For these cloud holdouts, especially large-scale businesses, the sheer complexity of the data they have on hand may be the barrier to migration.
In this post, we look at the major challenges to data migration and show how NetApp Cloud Data Sense can help map, classify, and streamline your data so you can make a clean data migration to the cloud.
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A migration project requires a large amount of planning, preparation, and testing to ensure its success. From deciding on how your organization will migrate—will it be a lift and shift to rehost the apps and data in the cloud, or rearchitecting your applications to take full advantage of the cloud?—there are innumerable decision points along the way. Among all these moving parts, there is one challenge that might present an almost insurmountable barrier to adopting the cloud: Sorting the data that needs to be migrated versus the data that can be left behind.
Before a migration takes place, an organization should consider the data it has on hand.
You'll need a good understanding of your source data in order to make informed decisions on what files to move. This will help ensure data quality, consistency, security, and compliance with data protection regulations and standards.
While it might be tempting to move everything and sort out these questions later, consider that fixing any problems with this data in the cloud can potentially be more complicated and expensive. Remember the rule of the cloud is pay-per-use—you’ll pay for the unnecessary data you have stored and for every minute it takes you to sort it out thereafter.
One way companies looking to migrate can avoid these issues is to create a “clean copy” of their data set to move to the cloud, one that avoids duplicate data, complies with all the relevant data regulations, and only includes vital business data. While that can be a challenge all on its own, NetApp Cloud Data Sense offers a way to help make that possible.
Check out our clean migration checklist here.
Data Sense is a data discovery, mapping, and classification tool that helps you stay on top of your data to meet data governance goals.
The solution can scan both structured and unstructured data in a wide range of storage repositories, including object storage, databases, and network-attached storage (NAS) appliances, across hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructure.
Data Sense leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze the content of your files, assigning your data to categories based on the type of data you have and its sensitivity. This gives you an efficient way to identify personal and sensitive data, which should be afforded tighter security measures and stored in accordance with regulations.
The data management resource, which you can access directly through NetApp Cloud Manager, provides a complete overview of all your data from a centralized dashboard and offers the following real-time insights:
With these tools, Cloud Data Sense can play an important role in the success of your data migration project by enabling you to sort through your data to make a clean migration.
Data Sense’s benefits include:
Now that we’ve taken a look at all the benefits, let’s see how they work in practice in some success stories from customers using Data Sense to perform clean migrations.
An American asset management company, which serves customers in more than 100 countries across the world, was planning to move 1.2PB of data to Cloud Volumes ONTAP. As the company operates in a highly regulated sector, it needed to remove any files containing personally identifiable information (PII) before going ahead with the migration.
The company decided to use Data Sense because it was able to identify PII with a high degree of accuracy and also because of the solution's high-performance capabilities—both of which were especially important given the sheer scale of data the company needed to scan.
Data Sense was able to quickly and efficiently:
A leading US oil and gas producer was in the process of migrating data from its on-premises servers to Microsoft Azure so it could gain access to more data analytics services.
Much of the information the business collected was geophysical, geochemical, and seismic data, which was used for analysis to find new and efficient ways to explore oil and gas reserves. The company’s migration was going to take place with the help of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Before the migration took place, a NetApp architect suggested using Data Sense to scan the data set before the migration took place. The company decided to try out the product by scanning its on-premises data, and was surprised to find that Data Sense uncovered PII and other sensitive data in their primarily scientific dataset.
As a result of the trial, the management team gave their approval to use Cloud Data Sense to help address the data’s regulatory compliance objectives.
A private college based in Florida recently began outsourcing its IT to a local managed service provider (MSP), which needed to migrate the educational institution's data to a NetApp ONTAP storage environment.
During the migration, the MSP discovered that permissions weren't being copied over correctly from their original location. The company used Data Sense to identify the permissions that were in place at the original storage location and then used this information to correctly secure data at its new location.
Without Data Sense, this would've been incredibly time consuming, requiring team members to look through trees of nested shares. But the solution was not only a huge time saver: Through its ability to identify duplicate and stale data, it also helped the college cut its storage costs by more than 50%.
The college continues to use the product as part of its IT arsenal for identifying unprotected personal data, and organizing and optimizing its storage.
For any company making the move to the cloud, it’s important to discover what data is on hand before the move takes place. Creating this clean copy is important because problems with your data will only get harder to solve after the migration takes place.
As we’ve read in the case studies above, NetApp customers are using Cloud Data Sense to help meet their data governance, compliance, and cloud transformation goals. To find out how you can create your clean data copy, download our new clean migration guidebook.