Don’t be fooled into thinking that because cloud adoption continues to rise, workload portability is an easy endeavour. Truth be told, the opposite is correct.
Several backup and data management vendors bring additional drawbacks too, which can include cumbersome processes and expensive add-ons or manual conversions that increase cost and complexity.
So, before you decide upon a potential approach or prospective vendor, keep these 5 cloud mobility considerations in mind.
- Prioritise agility
Leveraging a cloud with easy on-demand portability will increase agility across the board – simplifying and supporting migrations, using IT resources more strategically, and responding quicker to failure.
Workload portability is particularly important at a time when ongoing data growth makes it difficult to scale, manage, and secure your organisation’s most critical workloads and data.
- Allow for data recovery
The cost of building a dedicated site for recovery can be prohibitive, especially for SMBs. However, you can leverage the cloud as an on-demand restore site if the worst case scenario was to occur.
With simple workload portability across any cloud, you can easily move on-premises data to the cloud or bring it back on premises from the cloud. As a result, you can always access your data no matter what happens.
- Greater availability
There’s no need to procure hardware or software for greater availability with cloud workload mobility. You don’t even have to take the time to build a separate recovery site or modify, maintain and upgrade equipment.
The only requirement is purchasing what you want online and immediately restoring or migrating any physical or virtual workload to the cloud. Also, you can make sure on-premises data is always available regardless of what might happen to your on-premises environment.
- Unlock test and development
With the right cloud mobility solution, you’re given the ability to instantly provision copies of production workloads to accelerate development cycles and more easily expand their testing capabilities.
There’s no need to purchase and deploy new on-premises hardware either. Even when testing is complete, you can wind it all back down again.
- Adopt a multi-cloud strategy
According to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud Report, 84 per cent of organisations have a multi-cloud strategy, and most organisations are leveraging approximately five clouds each. Public cloud is the single top priority for 31 per cent of enterprises too.
Therefore, it makes perfect sense to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, of which cloud mobility and workload portability are essential components. This is especially true if you want to achieve a competitive advantage by moving data across clouds.
