Written By Steve Blow, Technology Evangelist, Zerto

Moving house. It is undeniably stressful. But, the massive headache of finding the right house is really only the beginning. One of the hardest parts of moving is lugging all of your belongings from one place to another, whether it's the house next door or over in a new town, either way there is plenty of chaos that always ensues. You'd better hope that you hire the right movers, or that precious family heirloom of yours will leave whole, and arrive in bits.

This scenario is mirrored in the IT world, as many organizations continue embracing hybrid cloud, so too is the need to move workloads across infrastructures increasing. With data the new gold, and migrations of valuable data occurring more frequently than ever, the precious data is the corporate equivalent to that family heirloom - companies need to be sure they are using tools they trust with the secure migration of their workloads. But, with security protection and integration at the forefront of migration, how much sense does it really make to lug all of your workloads along with you?

Becoming more like a Canadian goose

As a rule, like the Canadian goose, technology never stays in one place. With ever-growing pace, organizations should also be moving forward, focusing on how they can take advantage of the latest technologies as soon as possible. It's never easy to move away from legacy infrastructure, and the challenges around migration have now become accepted as a given. But this shouldn't be the case.

In an ideal world, IT organizations need to be able to move and migrate workloads as swiftly and as confidently as a goose takes off to migrate halfway around the world. To do this, they need to shift workloads from server to server, between different cloud hosts, from test environments to QA and from on-premise to data center. Wherever the workloads are moving to and from, the owners expect it will be transparent and quick, as well as mitigating any risks to the valuable data being migrated. That is the key to successful, stress-free moving.

Getting the right movers

Mobility solutions have changed in the last few years, with the traditional method of the "lift-and-shift" proving inefficient. This is because of its labor and time intensive way of lifting applications from old servers and placing them into new hardware. Another problem with approaching upgrades in this way is that it could mean a substantial amount of downtime, with so many uncertainties that it leaves businesses open to failures and vulnerabilities.

Moreover, this becomes an increasingly critical capability as businesses across every sector embrace software and applications as key business drivers. Whether that is for a retailer that is dependent on online sales, or banks that require the most up-to-date applications to keep customers happy, workloads need to be moved around without interrupting the customer experience or incurring any downtime.

As this becomes more important, organizations will look to deploy mobility solutions that are agnostic when it comes to hypervisor, storage and cloud. As well as those that are able to perform fail back, failover, and regression tests prior to the action.

Moving it all at once

In order to achieve high levels of operational agility, almost every business will need to look at transforming and modernizing its IT strategy. Often, this means having to move workloads which, as previously mentioned, is not an easy task. For any companies, there are too many technology stacks in their environment, which coupled with wanting to leverage the cloud, brings even more complexity to the move.

Companies need to angle their digital transformation with this in mind, as well as ensuring absolutely no downtime. Deploying a technology that can confidently migrate workloads to a preferred location with resilient countermeasures to protect against any impact of these changes is the vital ingredient to any migration project.

Using point solutions for migration, protection, and resilience was the old clunky, complex, and ultimately risky method of the lift and shift. Attempting to combine business continuity and disaster recovery with a separate backup product that enables hybrid cloud is a similarly convoluted and risky strategy.

When moving to a new house, once you have experienced the ease of having movers to come in, pack up, load the truck and deliver it to the new place, it is rather difficult to go back to cramming it all in the back of your own car. So too will businesses begin to understand the value of a tool that does it all when it comes to moving and protecting workloads to embrace a new infrastructure model. Especially because easily moving a workload to a new site is important as organization's IT infrastructure becomes more flexible. Along with this, businesses want to feel assured that all their workloads, irrespective of where they sit, are completely protected and can be recovered at any moment and easily moved again.  

So, while moving house can be a nightmare, and the geese may make it look easy, it's simply something we all do - and IT is not exempt from this. Just like someone would ensure they researched and hired the right mover for their valuable personal possessions, it is also important that businesses find the right tool to pack your workloads safely, one that handles them with suitable care, and ensure they reach their destination on time.

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About the Author

Steve Blow is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto. Among other things, he is responsible for both helping customers succeed in their digital transformation journeys using Zerto's IT Resilience Platform. Steve has a particular interest in automation, particularly all things API.

Using his passion for technology Steve works with clients to help optimize their IT strategies, and make sure customers understand how Zerto can bolster a mobility, backup or disaster recovery strategy. Steve's main initiative and biggest focus is on driving and ultimately seeing real improvements come to fruition for organizations.

Prior to becoming a Technology Evangelist, Steve was responsible for helping customers to identify the technical requirements for their business and overcome technology challenges, and managing the technical onboarding globally for Zerto within IBM resiliency services. Steve has over 14 years' industry experience in IT solutions architecture, design, engineering and support.