Google Cloud Platform Blog: Five Options for Cloud to Cloud Data Migration

Google Cloud Platform Blog

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Five Options for Cloud to Cloud Data Migration

Monday, October 21, 2013

Today's guest post comes from Michael Anthony, Technical Director at TwinStrata. TwinStrata is a Google Cloud Platform technology partner that simplifies storage expansion and disaster recovery by making cloud storage look and feel like local storage.data backup and recoverymigrate their data from one cloud provider to another

Direct cloud-to-cloud migration: Some providers have direct, high-speed connections to other providers. For example, Google and TwinStrata have worked together to develop a way to migrate data from one cloud to the next using Google’s own high-speed connections, and without any impact on the customer’s network. Once the data is moved, it’s a fairly simple exercise to maintain access to the data using TwinStrata CloudArray - without having to modify any of your application settings. And in fact, that’s exactly what we did for customers such as IAC in the last few weeks.

Cloud compute migration: One of the fundamental advantages of using cloud-integrated storage is the ability to spin up the software in the cloud. By spinning up your cloud gateway in a cloud compute environment, you can do the migration from one cloud to the other using without taxing your own network.

Repoint the cache: For some organizations, an on-premise transfer is unnecessary. Some of our customers (particularly those using cloud for backup or application data) keep a full copy of everything they have in the cloud in their local cache. If you’re accessing the cloud through a cloud gateway, you should be able to just repoint the cache to the new provider, thereby limiting the impact on your network to just outgoing traffic.

On-premise transfer: If the amount of data you have in the cloud is small, and your corporate network is large, you can bring the data back on premise and then send it to the new cloud of your choice. If you’re using a cloud enabler such as TwinStrata’s cloud-integrated storage software CloudArray, this exercise becomes significantly simpler because you can simply migrate the volume to another provider, but it can take a toll on your network.

Start fresh: The final option is limited to those customers who use cloud storage to back up their on-premise data. A small number of organizations with which we’ve worked have elected to start fresh with a new cloud provider by copying their on-premise backups to the new cloud, Once it is safely migrated, they can then delete the data from their existing cloud (or in the case of Nirvanix, just throw away the encryption keys so it can’t be accessed). This option is viable only if you’re using the cloud for backups and have enough onsite copies of your backup to meet your retention policy.