As an IT manager or storage engineer, you have a lot to consider when deciding whether and how to migrate data into the cloud. Not only must you understand the benefits and potential limitations of cloud storage, you need to know what this means for your existing IT infrastructure. What does decommissioning involve in practice, and how can you undertake it securely?
A DATA-DRIVEN WORLD
For many organizations, both large and small, some degree of cloud deployment for storage and compute is increasingly inevitable nowadays. There is just too much data to go around. IDC projects that by 2025 approximately 20 percent of the data produced will be critical to the functioning of everyday life. Data is becoming as important to the global ecosystem as core resources such as oil and electricity.
But why choose the cloud for your data? Proponents cite the usual benefits—scalability, reliability, data security, redundancy, capex reduction. Nobody though is suggesting that cloud services offered by the likes of AWS and Google represent a silver bullet solution for all of your storage and compute needs. In recent years, a growing consensus has converged around the idea of hybrid, combining the best of the enterprise data center and the public cloud. Survey after survey reveal continued momentum toward cloud storage while unearthing underlying reservations on the part of companies about exactly how far to go.
According to 2018 research from the Evaluator Group, levels of off-premise data storage will grow by an annual rate of 20-30 percent through 2020, but the majority of storage spending remains on-premise. “As they embrace public cloud, (IT managers) continue to experience barriers to adoption such as network bandwidth and interoperability,” says Camberley Bates, managing director at Evaluator Group. Separate reports from the Uptime Institute and enterprise cloud solutions provider Nutanix confirm the adoption of hybrid arrangements. “Hybrid IT is now the norm, creating technology, organizational, and management complexity,” the Uptime Institute says.
Nonetheless the benefits of the cloud are evident for most companies. The prospect of reducing large-scale capital expenses and the ability to access advanced data services such as replication and encryption offered by the cloud service providers are attractive.
Up, up, and away. Research from Gartner estimates the global public cloud services market will grow year-on-year by more than 20 percent to $186.4 billion for 2018.
REVERSE MIGRATION
Commercial realities change, however. What is right in one year may not be right in another. Take Dropbox. The file hosting provider successfully built its service platform on the AWS cloud before realizing it could reduce costs by reverse migrating its user data to custom-built infrastructure in colocation facilities that it directly leased and operated. Through its “Infrastructure Optimization” plan, it initially absorbed additional storage costs as it duplicated data between AWS and its own data centers.
Now that the migration is over and the need for running duplicated storage is gone, Dropbox is beginning to realize financial gains. “Our Infrastructure Optimization reduced unit costs and helped limit capital expenditures and associated depreciation,” the company announced in a recent SEC filing. “Think about how you use your data,” says Stephen Buckler of Horizon Technology. “When Dropbox started off it made sense to use AWS, but as it grew the cost of AWS was a drag on its P&L. By bringing the data center in-house they saved $75 million over two years.”
In spite of the upfront savings associated with the cloud, an eventual increase in costs seems to come with the territory. The Evaluator Group found that in 75% of the use cases it identified for migrating, cloud storage ended up costing companies more. Nonetheless, the majority of respondents still believed the total additional cost was, on balance, worth it. Such factors as
- rapid deployment
- scalability
- data security
- infrastructure reliability
- staying ahead of tech upgrades
positively influence organizations thinking about provisioning resources in the cloud.
The factors motivating the migration to the cloud are varied, with disaster recovery at the top of the list. Data security, archiving, analytics, application mobility, content distribution, and testing are also cited.
To read the full series, download our free report on planning your cloud storage migration.
