It’s not uncommon for us to hear from clients that the “thing” holding organizations back from fully migrating to the cloud is their data. The reason given is that it is too valuable of an asset to move. We believe, however, that it is too valuable an asset not to move to the cloud. Keeping your database on-premises holds your business back from making the coveted “full digital transformation.”
The fact is, legacy on-premises databases put a considerable burden on IT infrastructure, staffing resources and data security. Most organizations want their DBAs to spend their time on optimizing their database performance, ensuring they have the correct high-level architecture and experimenting, however older databases can cause administrators to expend considerable time on troubleshooting, capacity and performance issues.
There are several options available from AWS and Azure for moving your database to the cloud. A simple lift-and-shift of your on-premises database to a cloud instance will allow you the most flexibility to continue working with your database in a fashion you are most familiar with. You maintain complete control of the operating system, database version and administration as you currently do, but you have the advantages of the cloud with the ability to add CPUs, cores or capacity on demand.
Alternatively, you can move to a Managed Database Service. These services deliver fully optimized infrastructure specific to your choice of database to improve performance and ensure you are running on the latest version with the newest features. They also lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by performing many of the administrative tasks, such as automating patching and back-ups while guaranteeing high availability with multiple 9’s of uptime.
However, because your data is an invaluable asset to your organization, it is understandable that there is some hesitance to undertake the transformation. Migrating the application database is perhaps the most critical step in any workload migration. Maintaining integrity and availability of data is critical, and the time taken to synchronize data between old and new systems may determine the duration of any service disruption during migration.
This is where it helps to partner with a services provider like 2nd Watch. Over the last decade, we have developed a proven methodology to help our clients overcome the challenges and hesitancy of moving one of their most precious assets, their database, to the cloud. Our Database Migration Service comprehensively examines your databases and applications and maps out all the dependencies. We work with you to understand unique requirements, such as the impact of latency on your applications’ performance, to ensure the migration is seamless to your customers.
Migrating your database to the cloud creates new opportunities to derive value from data, utilize modern BI and AI tools, and reduce the cost and management overhead of traditional on-premises solutions. It can increase the time database architects and developers are able to spend on high-value projects, such as developing new applications and applying advanced analytics. Whether you are running MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB or Oracle Database, 2nd Watch can help you migrate your database to your cloud platform of choice.
To learn more, download our datasheet for details on migrating your database to Microsoft Azure or AWS.
-Dusty Simoni, Sr Product Manager
