Making Sense of It All: What Migrating Workloads Really Means

With cloud computing growing in popularity, as the amount of big data continues to explode, efficient data and workload migration is becoming more critical to success and staying competitive across a variety of marketplaces.

A new white paper from Digital Realty focuses on best practices for workload migration, which can get complex quickly, and what it actually means for today’s businesses.

According to Digital Realty, workload migration simply means that you’re moving data, assets, software, etc., from one location to another. For example, a previously on-premise workload can be moved into a cloud environment or migrated between physical locations.

Although about any workload can be migrated, as long as its assets and components are currently in definable locations, the new paper walks readers through what makes a workload a good candidate for migration.

Digital Realty points out that not all workloads may be good candidates for a move, but the best include: 

• Storage, backup and archiving data 
• Workloads or applications that are loosely coupled
• Multi-tiered applications
• Applications that have been architected to scale
• Workloads that have variable utilization or are bursty in nature

The report also points out a few key considerations to address before making the decision to migrate a workload, including connectivity, current setup, hardware, business benefits and data management.

Organizations absolutely need to make sure they have enough connectivity both to ensure the migration goes smoothly and to guarantee that all end users can adequately obtain and utilize affected data, tools and processes. — Digital Realty

Migration isn’t without its challenges, which is why the report offers a list of ‘migration missteps,” that often lead to common migration pitfalls. It covers four major issues the organizations should steer clear of during migration:

• Not enough connectivity
• Lack of access for all remote users
• The new environment is the wrong size or not elastic enough
• Difficulty importing and exporting data

One of the reasons workload migration has come up more in recent discussion is the growth in cloud computing and cloud migrations.

The cloud migration service market grew almost 32 percent last year, reaching a valuation of $72.4 billion in the year, according to a Gartner study. And a Forrester analyst  found that 69 percent of companies in Europe and North America are migrating workloads to cloud environments.

Download Digital Realty’s new white paper today, “Everything You Need to Know About Migrating Workloads,” that explores what migrating workloads really means, and best practices for your next migration project — cloud or otherwise.