Migrating Your Company to the Cloud

Storing your data in the cloud is fast becoming the new norm and it's because this innovative data storage is a cheap, fast, one-size-fits all solution when compared to on-premises storage. As such, companies are migrating from outdated on-premises infrastructure to more cost-effective cloud storage in droves, taking advantage of the faster speeds, simplified security and lower costs.   

Typically, you can store data in hot storage, like Wasabi’s, for less than just the annual maintenance on the same amount of on-premises storage from other vendors. If you don’t absolutely need to run storage on-premises, it’s cheaper and a lot less hassle to leave it to a cloud storage specialist like Wasabi. 

What is on-premises to cloud migration? 

On-prem to cloud migration refers to the process of moving data, applications, and IT processes from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based services. This transition enables organizations to leverage cloud benefits such as scalability, flexibility, cost-efficiency, and enhanced security. 

But before we discuss all the benefits to leveraging cloud storage, let’s first look at all the issues with on-prem storage. 

Problems with on-premises storage 

Though companies move to a cloud-native or cloud-first approach, it’s worth nothing some of the key benefits to storing and computing data on-premises. The capacity for customization, extensive control over data security configurations, and control over implementation and upgrade processes are what kept these technologies popular for so long. However, depending on your IT and business strategies, these “benefits” can also be seen as distractions and burdens. 

Nonetheless, the amount of data that is now being produced is outgrowing the ability to store it at a reasonable price using on-prem technologies.  

On top of that, companies recognize the increased value of the data that’s being generated. From day-to-day operations and logistics information to all of your software and applications, there is no shortage of critically important information being captured every second of every day. So, what are the problems with continuing down the tried-and-true path of a robust on-prem storage approach? 

Cost 

On the surface, on-prem storage seems like it would be a cost-effective approach, given that you can specify every aspect of your implementation, but many of these costs become hidden amongst your organization’s larger operating budgets, cemented into the annual overhead with little regard for revisiting or optimizing that spend. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) tasked with cost management would do well to know, with confidence, where on-prem dollars are going:  

Capital Expenditures (CapEx) – With any on-prem approach, there are significant equipment costs upfront. Also, the initial ROI often takes years to recognize due to these initial costs for equipment, personnel, training, etc. 

Operating Expenditures (OpEx) – With any large on-prem setup, you’ll have any or all of the following operational costs:  

• Recurring power and backup power sources 

• Cooling equipment 

• Rack space/physical space for the servers and other equipment 

• Annual hardware and software maintenance and support fees 

• Administrative costs and an employee administrators tasked with upkeep 

When you consider the total cost of ownership, there are a lot of hidden costs to running on-premises storage. Some of these costs are soft costs, such as the distraction factor—the fact that you have IT personnel baby-sitting physical servers instead of working on things that will really move your business forward—or the risk that your on-premises equipment could become obsolete more quickly than planned. For example, today’s “hot” servers could seem tired and slow in a few years, while the performance of cloud storage will keep pace with new market expectations, while remaining relatively inexpensive. Once you purchase on-premises infrastructure, you’re stuck with the cost. 

It’s apparent that the cost disadvantage of using on-prem storage will continue to grow as the cloud becomes more affordable, capable and unavoidable as the preferred choice for your infrastructure. The operating efficiencies available to “hyperscale” public cloud providers will continue to drive costs down and streamline aspects of infrastructure that are simply difficult for other enterprises to address. 

Complexity of configuration and administration 

Legacy storage systems are notoriously difficult to configure and administer. Professionals who work on this equipment and software will need ongoing, specialized training or you’ll be paying for expert support from your vendors. As your on-prem system gets older, the upkeep will require more specialized, expensive care. 

Data backup and disaster recovery 

One of the most important roles of your storage infrastructure is your ability to back up and protect your data in case of a problem – whether it’s a small-scale file recovery need or a full-blown disaster recovery scenario. 

As your company grows, this issue becomes more pressing while the solution becomes more difficult. It’s likely that some portion of your backups are stored physically offsite as part of your backup/DR strategy, but delays of hours if not days are common in these scenarios. 

Scalability 

The lack of scalability is perhaps the biggest drawback to on-prem storage, especially for companies worried about what use cases are coming next.  

Your on-prem systems are only as scalable as the hardware and software it’s built with. 5-year-old servers aren’t nearly as capable of doing what new servers are, and those now-new servers won’t be nearly as capable as servers 5 years from today. Continuous innovation is never going away – that's great for your business but bad for your long-term investment in on-premises hardware. In order to remain scalable with an on-prem approach, you’ll need to purchase new equipment to keep pace. It’s unavoidable. 

The further your software and hardware gets from its manufacture date, the more likely it is for vendors to discontinue support plans, retire products, or start charging for the advanced upgrades needed to keep the equipment operational. In other words, your scalability ceiling is relative to the time in which your “scalable” systems were deployed, and today’s ceiling is in the cloud. 

Security 

Securing your on-site data can be a bit more challenging if you are doing it yourself. That’s because the cybersecurity landscape as a whole continues to evolve. Both financial service and healthcare organizations, for example, need to remain in tune with the ever-changing cybersecurity standards in their industry, including implementing proper access controls and auditing to ensure sensitive data security and compliance.  

Additionally, many internal security initiatives are focused on eliminating access to your systems from outside or foreign devices. But that approach won’t eliminate breaches that originate internally. Sure, you can block all the hackers in the world from accessing your systems, but sometimes all it takes is one ill-intentioned employee or one lapse in user judgment. When these activities occur inside of your firewalls, it can be devastating. 

When it comes to security, the technological issues are much easier to solve. It’s people you should be more concerned about. This gets to the “fat finger problem.” Take a look at some of the major data losses and you’ll notice they all share the common thread of being caused by human error. When an Oakland, California police department lost 25% of its body cam videos, when Amazon accidentally took down a large portion of the internet, and when hundreds of companies lost data due to ransomware, a human was to blame in each case. 

One way to minimize human error as a threat to your data is to make it impossible for an “oops” to turn into a career- and business-limiting issue. Immutable storage functionality, for example, makes your data read-only once it's written, by whatever policy you decide – the data cannot be deleted or overwritten until the policy rules expire. 

Without immutable data, it won’t matter how many firewalls you have, your system will still be vulnerable to human error – which security studies show happens far more often than system errors or attacks by hackers. 

Why migrate to the cloud? 

There are more and more reasons to take the plunge into cloud computing and storage, each becoming more convincing as time passes. CIOs, CTOs, VPs of IT, SysAdmins and other IT decision makers often need a convincing business case for their company to migrate. Luckily, the benefits of bringing cloud computing to the business can be easy and exciting for CFOs and CEOs to understand in relation to their business goals. 

The main reason companies large and small are making the switch is because of the cost savings involved. 

Lower costs  

The cost of Cloud 2.0 implementations are significantly less expensive than legacy on-prem implementations and Cloud 1.0. Cloud 2.0 is a term used to describe the next generation of highly optimized and efficient cloud services, and it differs from first generation cloud through radically reduced pricing while simultaneously taking advantage of technology innovations that result in much higher performance. 

Cloud 1.0 refers to the first generation of cloud storage vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). And while the cost of 1.0 vs. 2.0 can vary (2.0 is more efficient and less expensive), the cost benefits of cloud providers include: 

Equipment investments are non-existent

You’ll never have to replace outdated hardware, and recurring hardware maintenance fees are eliminated. 

Operating expenses are minor 

You don’t need an entire team to understand the advanced configuration complexities, nor extra physical office space and utilities to house and power your servers. 

Ease of maintenance 

With the cloud, much of the maintenance and upkeep initiatives stay mostly out of sight, out of mind, and away from your budget.  

Maintenance and regular updates are built into the cloud service models. Value-wise, service vendors know that their products are only a key differentiator if they can keep pace with the technology advancing around them. Therefore, to continue serving their customer base without interruption, they’ve become adept at advanced techniques for implementing large systematic updates and new features, such as advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities, without disruption.  

Reliability & durability 

Your cloud data isn’t exactly sitting on a single drive somewhere in Drivetown, USA. Historically, storage solutions have achieved high durability by replicating data across multiple drives using various RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) schemes. Though it has evolved, RAID is an expensive and outdated (30+ years old) technique from both a price and performance perspective. Cloud 1.0 storage solutions all grew out of the state-of-the-art technology available when early clouds were conceived, which was RAID. 

With Cloud 2.0 storage, everything has become even more reliable and more durable. Advanced, industry-proven erasure coding algorithms help protect data against disk failures and media errors. Each data object transforms into a series of codes, which are distributed across independent disks for resiliency. In the event of disk failures or data corruption, the original data object can be reconstructed using only a subset of the codes. Erasure coding is more efficient than and just as reliable as traditional replication-based data protection schemes. With this, cloud 2.0 providers like Wasabi can fully protect customer data without the overhead of maintaining duplicate copies on multiple disks. 

Alleviating bandwidth concerns 

One of the initial concerns about cloud storage, especially in the first wave, was the high cost of bandwidth needed to truly leverage it as intended. But, like any commoditized utility, the cost of accessing high speed internet has dropped significantly, alleviating bandwidth concerns and allowing for greater cost efficiency and business growth.   

New file transfer acceleration and direct connection techniques also make it possible to squeeze more throughput out of your bandwidth than you may realize. The revolution in connectivity is tightly tied to several trends here that make Cloud 2.0 options significantly different from your choices just 5-10 years ago. 

Infinitely scalable  

Sounds like an exaggeration, right? It’s actually not far-fetched at all. 

While Cloud 1.0 data storage options were theoretically infinitely scalable, their performance was still tied to the limitations of on-prem solutions – as Cloud 1.0 storage was built on the same technology as your legacy on-prem options. 

Combine that poor performance with the relatively high price of Cloud 1.0 (nearly the same as on-prem), and the hidden costs of getting data out of the cloud, and infinite scalability becomes infinitely expensive. 

Contrast that with Cloud 2.0 storage solutions like Wasabi, where performance is faster than the competition and 80% less expensive, with no hidden and unpredictable fees. Now, infinite scalability can truly be yours without the infinite headache of explaining to your CFO why your storage costs were twice as much as you'd expected them to be. 

Security 

Cloud 2.0 technology has laid to rest many of the concerns over data security. Take, for instance, the highly regulated healthcare industry. HIPAA and HITECH regulations represent some of the more stringent compliance requirements around electronic health information. 

Like many industries, healthcare regulatory organizations conduct regular and frequent assessments of cloud vendor security systems to ensure that they meet or exceed compliance standards. 

Securing confidential and proprietary data will always be a hot-button issue, and cloud service providers, like Wasabi, remain committed to ongoing research and implementation of ever-improved ways to protect the information that powers your business. Forward-facing cybersecurity initiatives are ingrained within cloud providers and their services are designed to meet stringent security and availability requirements, including: 

• FERPA 

• HIPAA/HITECH 

• CJIS 

• GDPR 

• MPAA 

Wasabi takes your data security extremely seriously, from physical security to a secure network architecture, our policies, procedures, and features enforce your data privacy and security needs. 

Additionally, Wasabi equips users with immutable storage capabilities, making your data impossible to delete or alter. Aside from the obvious security reassurances, another key advantage of immutable storage is the enhanced auditability it provides your team and/or outside auditors. 

If raw data is requested as part of a compliance audit, organizations and cloud service providers alike can provide investigators with not only the unchanged data, but also with the technical specifics of how that data is immutably protected. 

Extend the life of previous on-premises storage investments 

Just because you are migrating to the “cloud” doesn’t necessarily mean that your data will be 100% stored off-site. Cloud storage is ideal for a variety of applications, including primary storage for on-premises or cloud-based workloads, secondary storage for backup and recovery, and archival storage for long-term data retention. This versatility protects and extends previous storage infrastructure investments, allowing you to migrate to the cloud on your own terms and ensure business continuity while also minimizing security risks in the process.  

Use cases might include: 

Cap-and-grow 

Keep existing applications on legacy on-prem storage and use the cloud as primary storage for new applications like Big Data analytics and IoT. Transition existing applications to the cloud over time and gradually decommission legacy storage platforms as needed. 

Lift-and-shift 

Use the cloud as primary storage when moving on-premises applications to the cloud en masse. 

Backup and recovery 

Protect on-premises storage for a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. 

Archival Storage 

The cloud offers affordable and durable long-term data retention. Move infrequently accessed data to cloud-based solutions to free up expensive legacy storage capacity and better align storage costs with data value. 

Data center transformation 

Cloud solutions help with transitional storage to support corporate mergers and acquisitions, or data center relocation or consolidation initiatives. 

Hybrid approaches 

Until your company is fully cloud-native, you will need some type of on-prem storage, especially considering the many ways you can optimize to squeeze the most out of your on-prem storage. 

A hybrid or multi-cloud approach is common and cloud providers can usually accommodate businesses who incorporate some form of on-prem storage into their IT architectures. 

Hybrid Cloud 

A hybrid cloud is more commonly used to describe an approach to a solution that lives partly within your on-prem infrastructure, with connections to one or more cloud providers. 

Why go hybrid? 

A hybrid approach has several benefits. For one, migrating to the cloud is a big decision for any organization, especially when you’ve already invested in on-prem hardware. Implementing a hybrid strategy allows you to get some extra life out of that expensive hardware, and leverage systems that would be difficult to retrofit for a cloud-based storage model. This strategic decision can transform business operations while providing a platform for innovation and competitive advantage. To realize these benefits, however, you should map out your existing infrastructure so you can be prepared to mitigate risks and potential challenges and get an early read on any security considerations. 

While hybrid clouds and multi-cloud terms are often used interchangeably, there are some key differences to note. 

Multi-Cloud 

A multi-cloud strategy is the use of more than one cloud provider, usually consisting of 2 or more public clouds. Because different departments, use cases and applications may have different requirements, a multi-cloud strategy provides flexibility in selecting the right cloud for the right job. 

Using a multi-cloud also protects your company and its data in the rare instance that one of the clouds fails. It also provides you the safety of not being locked into any single cloud vendor, held ransom by their business model and the hidden fees that many of the big names in public cloud infrastructure charge their customers. 

True multi-cloud storage requires: 

• Support for leading and next-generation public cloud storage services, or de facto API standards like S3 

• Federated security management to eliminate the complexity and variations in cloud security models 

• The ability to store data in native cloud format for open access by cloud apps and services 

• Simple policy-based data management 

Until recently, multi-cloud strategies weren’t really a viable option for most companies due to the different proprietary formats across public clouds and gateway products. Each public cloud speaks a different language with their APIs, and everything from security to authentication is handled differently by each as well. Wasabi has helped lead the charge in multi-cloud technologies and integrations through strategic partnerships with industry leaders, and compliance with the S3 API. 

The cloud migration process 

The data migration process from on-premises to cloud storage is largely dependent on your data (size, structure, security needs) and your network connection speed.

How long does migrating to the cloud take? 

With a comprehensive data migration plan, you should be able to accurately estimate the time needed for the migration. If you have access to 100 Gbps network speeds and the size of your transferring data is less than 1 PB, then the initial migration should last a few weeks. The slightly more common, yet still high, speed of 10 Gbps would take 10 times longer. However, with proper planning and implementation of best practices, a successful transition to the cloud can be achieved within a reasonable timeframe even with network speed limitations. 

Knowing your options ahead of time will help you to better understand the approach that’s best for your company and a successful migration, whether it’s over a public network, public network using file acceleration, a direct connection, a physical transfer appliance, or some combination. 

Public Network Connection 

With a public network connection, you would simply leverage your existing internet connection to interface with your cloud storage. Unless you’re saddled by slow network connectivity or strict data security requirements, the public network connection is suitable for most organizations, both during the migration and for ongoing connectivity to your cloud resources. 

Public Network Connection + File Acceleration 

Legacy file transfer techniques (like FTP and SFTP for example) are inefficient compared to more modern techniques. With much higher bandwidth connections, and much larger files, there are a variety of solutions available that can squeeze much higher throughput out of your connectivity than you may have thought possible. File acceleration services do just that and are ideal for organizations looking to move large collections of data or large media files like video. 

Direct Connect 

Cloud service providers all offer direct connect options for organizations that require private connectivity directly to the cloud data centers. A migration via direct connection is much faster and more secure than using a similar speed public network connection. You should set up a direct connection if you will also need post-migration direct connectivity between your facilities and your cloud service provider.   

Physical / Bulk Transfer 

A physical or bulk migration is sort of like the good old days of saving something to a disk, then taking the disk to another location to then open and access that same data – except on a much larger scale. The Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance, for example, is a cost-effective and convenient migration option when your network connection speed is lacking. Keep in mind, even if your network connection speed is high, the sheer volume of the data you plan to migrate could lead to a lengthy transfer time. The Wasabi Ball provides the ability to move large datasets quickly and conveniently. With some customers, Wasabi ships multiple Wasabi Balls at a time in order to move large volumes of data at once. 

After the Migration 

Once the initial on-prem to cloud migration has ended, you’ll continue using either a direct or public network connection to read, write, delete or update your cloud data, whichever your use cases and budget demand.  

Cloud system providers like Wasabi partner with both innovative cloud technology and software/hardware vendors of all types so that you can create a robust and flexible cloud storage stack personalized to your company’s specific needs.