A Cloud Migration Boom is Underway at U.S. Companies
So many companies have undergone a significant digital transformation over the past two years. For starters, they now need to support shifts in remote work, automation, and even how and where customers interactions happen. As a result, the IT infrastructure of America’s companies is under more strain than ever. This has kicked off a cloud migration boom and accompanying data modernization efforts.
Brands must deal with managing, protecting, and acting on rafts of new data. The digital landscape is forcing more and more business leaders to harness their organization’s data in a way that produces competitive advantages as well.
For this reason, cloud migration initiatives have become a top priority in many IT departments. Mauricio Vianna, as CEO of MJV Innovation, a consulting firm tasked by Fortune 500 companies with supporting their cloud migration initiatives and which recently hosted a virtual summit on the topic, sheds light on how companies are tackling it.
Mauricio Vianna: Traditionally, organizations have focused on transaction data and reports extracted from legacy databases. This is no longer the current scenario, with the arrival of new types of data, especially unstructured ones, such as images, audios, comments on social networks, email content, and data from sensors and smart devices. Conventional databases cannot handle large volumes of data, especially unstructured ones.
This is where the infrastructure and tools contained in data modernization come into play. As a first step, data modernization complements legacy databases with other types of databases such as Big Data, Data Lakes, and NoSQL databases. This brings new advantages in terms of scalability, cost reduction, and ease of use compared to conventional data infrastructure.
It’s important to mention that legacy databases and data warehouses are still present in the corporate infrastructure of companies. This still occurs because some databases are very well structured to work with transactional applications. However, the infrastructure used in data modernization provides the means to develop applications based on Big Data, generating new business opportunities and new revenue lines.
MV: There is still no silver bullet on how corporations allocate their Cloud and data modernization budgets. However, some practices help companies in decision-making to modernize their data in the Cloud environment.
It’s always vital to avoid migrating data to the cloud without planning. Companies should invest in creating a data migration strategy for cloud. It is also paramount to reengineer the processes implemented with cloud data source/destination.
