Accelerated by the pandemic, organizations worldwide have embraced cloud technologies and services for remote work. Over the last few years, therefore, cloud adoption has risen dramatically. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025. Those organisations cannot fully execute digital strategies without using cloud-native architectures and technologies.
All this cloud spending is driving the need for more data migrations. However, moving data is often complex. These projects are often highly visible and carry large business risks. When a migration goes sideways, it can result in data loss, expensive downtime, and potentially a loss of business. A failed migration may also damage the team’s reputation or limit the careers of those on the project.
Fortunately, some software providers have customer success teams with expertise in planning, strategy and execution who are available to help. To ensure a migration project goes as smoothly as possible, here are four reasons IT professionals and managed service providers (MSPs) may want to tap their expertise.
1. For Improved Project Scoping and Planning
Customer success engineers can help you assess a company’s data, files and workloads to develop a roadmap for moving them. As part of this planning phase, success engineers can:
- recommend software and tools,
- outline the ideal sequence for your migration,
- give you a sense of how long it will take to cut over to your new system, and
- provide you with an accurate estimate of costs.
Understanding these factors is essential to planning and performing a successful migration.
2. To Move Beyond the Speed Test
Don’t be fooled by network speed tests. A speed test doesn’t convert, encrypt, parse, index or read data. Nor does it authenticate users – all steps that need to happen during a migration. Customer success engineers can estimate your migration time by looking at network speeds, server loads, throttling policies, and the volume and complexity of data moved. Finally, they’ll consider how background applications for content migration, data loss prevention and backup solutions will impact throughput on your network.
After that, they will help you determine the best time to perform a move, so you avoid scheduling it at a time when there is less throughput. Not doing so can create longer queue times, lengthen the migration duration and impact other business-critical tasks.
3. To Test and Validate
A customer success team can help you conduct a test migration to validate assumptions and provide a snapshot of how the larger project will perform. For instance, they can help you design a proof of concept, so the data ranges from an array of file sizes where the proof of concept starts small and increases the concurrence until failures appear. At this point, back the concurrence to a manageable threshold and give yourself a 50% buffer. This manner of proof of concept is the best way to hit the moving targets of migration performance. Then, once you’ve verified that everything will work with minimal disruption and no downtime, you can implement your plan.
4. For Faster Troubleshooting
Sometimes IT teams encounter problems that are difficult to overcome, even after hours of troubleshooting. In this situation, it’s essential to ask for expert help.
Most customer success engineers are familiar with and know how to address a wide range of problems, whether you’re migrating from a single platform or a hybrid software architecture. They can also help navigate the technological nuances of disparate software systems to ensure they work in a unified manner.
Moreover, a failure to ask for help can be costly. For instance, I recently learned of a situation where an IT director encountered significant problems when migrating his organization to a new system. A year later, the project was $2 million over budget and still not complete. At that point, the director sought expert help, but he could have saved significant time and money by bringing in experts earlier in the process.
Put every migration in context
Not every migration will require outside support but knowing that these engineers are available is helpful. Many IT teams have found they bring incomparable value and specialized knowledge to complicated projects. So, keep customer success engineers in mind the next time you are planning a migration. They might save you considerable time, money and stress.
BitTitan® is the premier provider of cloud migration solutions that support leading cloud ecosystems, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Its flagship product, MigrationWiz®, is the industry-leading SaaS solution for mailbox, document, public-folder, and Microsoft Teams migrations between a wide range of Sources and Destinations. Since 2009, BitTitan has moved over 25 million users to the cloud across 46,000 customers in 188 countries. BitTitan is an Idera, Inc, company. To learn more about MigrationWiz, visit www.BitTitan.com.
