One of the key drivers pushing tech execs to modernize their legacy systems is the need for a higher level of agility to meet the demanding pace of business. A valuable asset locked up in legacy systems is data.
Companies have decades of information that is available to be unlocked so that they can realize the benefits of this knowledge. True, a good portion of it could be aged, corrupted, or duplicate. So, cleaning this information in order to gain the true value is a key first step to leveraging this power for smarter and more focused business decisions.
The migration from legacy to the cloud allows organizations to leverage cloud service providers’ (CSP) out of the box ability to handle big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning. These capabilities allow for the extraction of insights from the data.
When moving data to the cloud, you also need to think about the structure for the target data, depending on the use cases. Data currently in structured format may be okay to dump into an unstructured data lake for analytics, as an example. But the format of the data in your legacy environment may or may not be in the same format in the cloud. It’s going to depend on the business need. So, there will be a lot of thinking required for how you are going to use this information.
CSP’s offer a wide variety of services and partner tools to help migrate your data, whether files, databases, machine images, block volumes, or even tape backups. Key to the success of data migration is understanding what to move, where to move it, how to use it, and to have people who can provide the knowledge for how to apply the data to make business decisions.