Market Perspectives

Industry challenges from demand, to supply chain latency, to fulfillment have created significant impediments for retailers, vendors, suppliers and customers across the globe, without a clear end in sight. Organizations that use digital technology to access information that informs actions — or reactions — to situations that arise unexpectedly demonstrate better digital readiness. The use of cloud-based systems that provide unified access to data and analytics offer the agility to better navigate today’s unpredictable environment. But for organizations that have not yet migrated workloads from solely on-premises and are seeking to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, the prospect of moving all that data can be daunting and should be addressed.

Ventana Research asserts that through 2025, 7 in ten organizations will migrate on-premises workloads to cloud data platforms, shifting focus to solving business needs rather than maintaining systems. However, the challenges of migration are considerable. Large-scale data migration historically relied upon manually deploying a significant number of resources, and required weeks — if not months — of planning, often resulting in operational disruption at the time of migration as well as potential gaps and failures post-migration. Additionally, organizations need data to remain consistent and available during migration to the cloud; as well, any changes must be captured or organizations face a time- and cost-intensive reconciliation. Of greater risk, data can be lost or compromised during the move. And, depending on the amount of data to be migrated, there is a risk of disruption to business continuity if the process taxes the existing network or, even worse, knocks the on-premises system offline for any length of time.

WANdisco allows organizations to focus on the collection, analysis and value of data rather than dedicate resources to the transfer process. It has security features in place to ensure the integrity of the data during and after migration. By utilizing WANdisco’s LiveData Platform to move data to the cloud, organizations can employ cloud applications that are significantly faster and more comprehensive at analyzing big data sets, providing results in a more timely and actionable manner than on-premises/Hadoop systems. This enables organizations to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning and other business intelligence tools to improve operational performance and gain greater insights for future growth and competitive advantage.

WANdisco has established itself as a leader in large-scale data migration applications with its LiveData Cloud Services, an automated, software-based data migration and replication platform that enables organizations to transition to the cloud without service disruption while significantly improving time to value LiveData Migrator allows users and systems to work continuously during migration because the self-service application records and transfers active changes while simultaneously replicating source data, ensuring all static and changing data is accounted for during the entirety of the migration. All this activity happens in the background so that business operations can continue as usual. WANdisco describes this as a “data-first approach” that prioritizes the volume of data, how it changes in real time, and the understanding that its consistent and immediate availability is needed in order to avoid interrupting business processes during its move to the cloud.

The foundation of WANdisco’s technology is the Distributed Coordination Engine, which achieves consensus to retain consistency and accuracy across data sources and types of data stores. The LiveData applications integrate with Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, among others, and work across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. LiveData Plane works in conjunction with LiveData Migrator to establish an active-active data plane consistency between an organization’s Hadoop on-premises system and cloud environment to ensure that any post-migration changes that occur in either source are immediately captured and synchronized in the other. This allows organizations to utilize both on-premises and cloud environments, if desired, without losing data accessibility or accuracy no matter where users are located or what data source they access.

Our research shows that many organizations are shifting data and analytics workloads to a consumption-based, hyper-scale public cloud model for a number of reasons. The flexibility of the cloud frees organizations from the administration and management of some systems while also reducing upfront costs. This flexibility is especially valuable today as work environments have notably changed and on-site management and staffing have significantly decreased for many organizations with the rise of work-from-home options. It further supports collaboration and file-sharing opportunities across the organization, regardless of worker location. And migrating data to the cloud enables organizations to easily scale resources up and down on demand, eliminating the need to acquire, install and configure hardware, or the resources required for such actions.

Effective usage of data across cloud-computing environments is an important step in an organization’s digital transformation and its ability to extract the most value from data using analytics and BI applications. WANdisco’s LiveData Platform offers organizations a secure, automated alternative to disruptive manual migration and streamlines the process of moving big data to the cloud without shifting attention or resources away from day-to-day business operations. Organizations looking to establish a higher priority for data resilience for cloud computing should consider WANdisco. For further reading on migrating to the cloud, see Ventana Research’s Cloud Migration Tips, Tricks and Traps.