Which Cloud Modernization Method Is Right for You? 3 Approaches for Migration
The cloud has become an increasingly popular tool for enterprises. Benefits like security, cost savings and more are further luring them to modernize. According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report, the top metrics for assessing progress against cloud goals for all organizations are cost efficiency/savings, delivery speed of new products/services and increased speed of innovation.1
More companies are focusing their investments and strategy on modernizing their operations to the cloud. A 2021 survey from O’Reilly shows that almost half (48%) of respondents planned to migrate 50% or more of their applications to the cloud in the coming year, while 20% planned to migrate all of their applications.2 This trend is only continuing to accelerate year after year.
It’s often said that, “data is the new fuel.” To get the most out of this data you need to combine, modify, standardize and put it under a different analytical lens on cloud. But this need to move or migrate data poses a big challenge to many companies. This is because the amount of data accrued grows with company size. And with growth in company size comes additional lines of business. This results in a greater number of teams and use cases. With that comes more data being stored in silos and duplicated. Moving this huge volume of data and selecting the right data to move to the cloud can jeopardize migration timelines and can even compromise the data itself.
To solve these data integration problems, enterprises rely on solutions that address a single issue at any given time. This also adds complexity. And some customers chose a best-of-breed solution in the market without realizing it might not be the right solution for their particular use case. That could derail their cloud modernization efforts and timelines, plus cause unnecessary frustrations within organizations.
When migrating to the cloud, we understand that enterprises have different timelines, strategies and processes, so one solution doesn’t fit all use cases. Below, we will suggest the right data integration tool for the job based on your use case. Then, we will walk you through the solutions available with Informatica to help you architect the right solution for each phase of migration that you’ll experience. This will help you accelerate your cloud modernization journey, avoid project cost overruns and meet deadlines effectively.
Modernization Use Case #1: Moving Legacy Data to the Cloud
When building a new data warehouse or data lake in the cloud, organizations need to ingest large volumes of data into the cloud. The same logic applies to migrating existing data warehouses or data lakes. This could mean moving tens of thousands of relational tables or data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Also, you need different types of ingestion — file, databases or streaming — depending on the data you are ingesting into the cloud.
This need often leads to the use of data integration point solutions that cannot scale, potentially resulting in higher costs, resources and lack of agility. Using such solutions can also jeopardize project initiatives and timelines.
Solution: Informatica’s mass ingestion service is part of the Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) platform. It can be used to ingest data at scale from databases, applications, files and streaming data sources. It can also transfer data with low latency to selected cloud targets and messaging systems.
Our IDMC mass ingestion service provides a codeless and wizard-driven approach to ingesting data and keeping it synchronized. It enables both technical and nontechnical enterprise users to build data pipelines in minutes. Equipped with a unified user interface, the IDMC mass ingestion service comes with out-of-the-box connectivity to hundreds of sources and targets.
Highly scalable, the service can be used to ingest terabytes of just about any data, of almost any pattern and latency. It can do so both in real-time and batch. Because this mass ingestion service is part of the broader IDMC platform, it comes with native user management, monitoring capabilities and alerting mechanisms.
Business value: Thanks to the wizard-driven IDMC mass ingestion service, an Informatica customer was able to build and ingest years of petabyte-scale data in a matter of minutes. As a result, the customer doesn’t have to undergo sizing exercises or identify the right resources for building the pipelines. Skipping these steps saves time and lowers capital expenses for the organization.
Modernization Use Case 2: Moving Existing Middleware to the Cloud
Most middleware solutions built in the last two decades were not architected to support modern needs and use cases in the cloud. For example, Informatica PowerCenter® has served as a trusted foundation for on-premises data integration and management initiatives, including data warehousing, analytics, data governance and more.
However, when considering modernizing to a cloud data warehouse, you want to be able to maximize its value. To accelerate the time to value for your new cloud data warehouse environments, you need to modernize both your data warehouses and your PowerCenter deployments.
Solution: To help customers who have invested a tremendous amount of time, resources and effort to build the data pipelines on which their businesses run and not to waste all these investments, Informatica offers modernization services to help you move from PowerCenter to IDMC.
The services are designed to help jumpstart your cloud-first strategies by leveraging all of the workloads you’ve already built in PowerCenter. Migrating your existing investments to the cloud is only the beginning. By adopting cloud-native data management, you will have a broad variety of services at your disposal to help you achieve your ongoing and evolving business objectives.
This solution modernizes a customer’s PowerCenter deployment to IDMC with the help of a purpose-built tool called Migration Factory. This tool incorporates the highest degree of automation possible to migrate a customer’s PowerCenter data assets, including mappings, sessions and workflows, to IDMC. The Migration Factory offers the fastest, lowest risk and most economical option for a PowerCenter customer to modernize to the cloud.
Business value: This fully automated data integration solution helps customers embarking on their cloud journey preserve the investment they have made in PowerCenter by migrating their data infrastructure to the cloud. IDMC offers performance and agility, lowers TCO, and de-risks business initiatives by helping to enable faster time to market and predictable business outcomes.
Modernization Use Case #3: Continuing to Support Legacy Applications After Migration
As enterprises are undergoing their digital transformation journey, their technical landscape is rapidly expanding. Their data is no longer trapped on-premises. It has evolved to be hybrid and multi-cloud. This poses a significant challenge, as some applications or mission-critical data might still reside in traditional legacy databases. These databases were not built for real-time or event-driven type integrations. Implementing one of these integrations could break any existing or new applications an enterprise is planning to build.
Solution: Informatica’s IDMC application integration service is a low code/no code solution that helps users build, manage and monitor APIs from a single UI. It supports almost any integration pattern, data set, user type or endpoint to automate business processes, expedite transactions and enable real-time analytics. It also supports multiple new and unique integration patterns. These include on-premises to cloud real-time data integration, real-time/B2B application integration, process orchestration, data synchronization and more.
Business value: IDMC’s application integration service helps organizations future-proof their integration needs with a microservices architecture. At the same time, it supports their mission-critical applications that reside on-premises, which organizations have invested a tremendous amount of time and money to build.
Get Started on Your Cloud Modernization
If you’re already an Informatica customer, reach out to your account team for further information and to get started. We offer free trials for data ingestion and API creation management. And for existing PowerCenter customers, we can provide a free assessment for migrating your PowerCenter investments to the cloud.
To learn more about modernizing data integration as part of your cloud modernization initiatives, read this eBook, “The Data Integration Cloud Modernization Playbook.”
1Flexera, State of the Cloud Report, 2022
2https://venturebeat.com/data-infrastructure/report-cloud-adoption-by-orgs-increases-to-90/
