5 Questions to Ask Before Migrating Your Data.
Do you feel as if your backup vendor is holding your data hostage? Because many backup shops use proprietary file formats, they can effectively block their customers from migrating to another vendor. Organizations become reluctant to adopt another backup solution because the new software won’t be able to restore their old backups. That’s daunting in an age when a business never knows when it may need to peek at that old data to meet legal or regulatory demands.
Those migration woes can be addressed by new technologies that will give organizations access to their old backup and archival data without resorting to the application that created it. B&L has developed a migration solution with our Archived Data Manager (ADM) software. It works with all backup systems and you can restore directly from ADM, eliminating the need for the original backup application.
However, ours is just one example of an easy-to-use migration solution. There are others out there. And before you choose the one that is right for your organization, you need to investigate and ask some important questions.
- How does the software collect the information it uses to index the old data?
Some migration offerings use techniques deployed by Internet search engines to acquire their data. Those Web crawling methods can consume bandwidth and degrade network performance. You’ll want migration software that’s designed to have a minimal impact on network operations. - How quickly and how much of a drain will it put on your network?
Some migration solutions also use slow network protocols and disk access routines when indexing information. That can extend the window for indexing. State of the art solutions can be very fast, indexing as much as 1TB of data an hour. - Is the process secure?
Security is another issue worth scrutinizing. Some migration packages create cache copies of data that increase the opportunities for hacker mischief. In addition, you should make sure that a prospective migration offering is compatible with your existing software. - How large are the resulting indexes?
The size of indexes created by migration software is also an issue fit for review. Some applications create indexes that are larger than the amount of data they index. In migration software, the smaller the index, the better. - How scalable is the solution?
An additional consideration is scalability. Some migration solutions are so expensive to implement, they’re only affordable as small scale deployments. Solutions designed to affordably scale across an enterprise should be given a better grade than those that don’t.
What is your biggest concern when migrating data? Have you not migrated to a new vendor because of fear of losing access to your archived data?
