Migrating data at the enterprise level is a challenging undertaking that requires careful planning. The key to such plans, and making those migrations work, is knowing your data.
But what if you’re missing that crucial insight into your data?
As we’ll see below, a lack of visibility and knowledge of an organization's data can seriously jeopardize—and sometimes even ruin—a migration project. In our follow-up blog, we’ll look at six steps to preventing migration failures. For complete coverage on this topic, download our full ebook: Why Data Migration Projects Fail (and What You Can Do About It).
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Data fuels organizations, so where that data resides determines how effectively those organizations can run. If there is a better place for the data to be located, it should be there. Data migrations are how that happens.
While data migration today is most frequently associated with adopting the cloud, or between clouds, data also needs to be moved between on-premises repositories, whether for hardware updates or consolidation efforts, and as part of comprehensive hybrid cloud architectures.
But since the majority of data migrations involve the cloud, it’s important to understand just how much these migrations play into the growth plans for organizations. Gartner recently reported the public cloud market has ballooned, growing 41.4% in 2021, and that cloud spending is projected to grow 20.7% in 2023, coming to a $591.8 billion total. The report adds that even if IT budgets need to shrink in the face of recent financial changes, the cloud makes such scalability possible—but you need to get there first. For organizations that are transitioning to a new cloud platform from an on-prem data center or from one cloud provider to another, the migration process is key to succeeding in the new environment.
Another factor to consider is how the cloud factors into growth. To meet the demands of current business trends, 46% of organizations are planning to scale up by increasing digital transformation efforts 2022 and 2023. As new platforms are adopted, data migration will be a key part to enabling those investments.
However, getting to the cloud is not as easy as it sounds.
For enterprises, the prospect of a data migration can be a daunting one. It requires intense levels of planning, investment, and governance. The process will affect every aspect of IT operations, all while trying to remain non-disruptive to normal operations, under budget, and on schedule. These challenges can be so difficult that many migration projects fail.
When migration plans fail, it doesn’t just make the migration itself difficult. Problems at the planning stage persist: research shows that poor planning can lead to failure in the new environment. In some cases only 16% finished on time and under budget and more than 80% of migrations either fail to deliver on time and/or go over budget.
How bad can these problems get? One mismanaged data migration led to the loss of more than 24 TB of highly sensitive data. For industries that are highly regulated, the migration can pose a risk that can lead to major fines and further financial consequences.
There are a number of contributing factors to migration failures. Just as every migration is unique because every organization’s data set and architecture is different, so are the reasons behind the failures.
However, there is some common ground that all migration failures share. And the reason behind that commonality is that all of these failures are due to one primary factor: lack of insight into data.
Since lack of insight into data is the major cause of migration failure, establishing such visibility is crucial to successfully transition to a new working environment. Proper data governance is the key to gaining that knowledge and using it effectively through every phase of the migration process.
NetApp has a way to solve the problems of improper data insights with BlueXP classification, powered by Cloud Data Sense. BlueXP classification automatically scans, maps, classifies, and reports your data in any type of storage repository.
For more on how NetApp can help, take a look at the next blog in this series where we dive into how BlueXP classification with Cloud Data Sense can meet all of the migration planning steps along the way, providing crucial data insights that will inform the right decisions to make your migration a success.