One-Click Migrate and Protect

Migration of critical applications and data requires planning and careful execution of a multi-step migration plan. All public cloud providers tell their customers about how good their availability is and provide guidance on how to migrate to their cloud. But at the end of the day it is still a shared responsibility model between the customer and the public cloud provider.

The Public Cloud Provider is responsible for meeting the availability guarantee for the Cloud infrastructure and services and the customer is responsible for availability of their instances and applications. So far so good. But even though the cloud infrastructure is designed with redundancy and availability in mind, we do hear of massive not so infrequent outages of Public Cloud infrastructure that affect a whole zone or region and take multiple hours to mitigate. These outages widely range from 100% packet loss affecting compute instances to unavailability of multiple critical services.

Clearly the customer needs to have another level of protection that is under their control to avoid being affected by the outage experienced by the cloud provider. This protection has to be in place as soon as the instances and applications are brought up in the public cloud infrastructure after migration and then continues protecting them as desired. Some of the key steps in setting up a Disaster Recovery plan is to do risk assessment, allocate resources, procure capital equipment and connectivity, set up the remote site and then use DR software. But when you are migrating your workload to the cloud a lot of these time- consuming steps are not needed and you can plan for DR right from the beginning of the migration activity. The existing DR plan can be adjusted and implemented immediately without any delays.

So, the ideal Migration to Cloud and Protection solution needs to be a single step. The disaster recovery portion of the migration plan needs to be accounted for early on in the process so that all aspects of protecting the workloads at the target cloud can be pre-selected and then executed seamlessly after the systems are migrated and are up and running. The protected systems and data in the on-prem data center should show up in the target cloud infrastructure, successfully recovered and already protected. Only then the lift and shift migration and cut over from on-premise to the cloud has truly been completed.

BENEFITS OF THIS SOLUTION

1. Going into production after migration becomes relatively easy since the DR Strategy has been done upfront and can be immediately implemented.
2. The DR Plan is specified in the system so that there is a single source of truth in the time of need.
3. It is easy for the IT department to justify the expense since the on-prem data center would already have an existing DR product and that would need to be set up for the migrated applications and servers on the primary cloud.
4. The reliability goals for the applications and servers are achieved without any gaps.
5. It provides a single workflow that is easy to use and offers end to end automation.

With SUREedge’s integrated Migration and DR solution, a customer can avail all the above mentioned benefits. The solution allows the customer to plan both migration and DR and then execute them back to back seamlessly, providing a faster time- to-production while lowering the risk of unavailability. Since the infrastructure already contains a DR solution for the primary workload, it is easier for the end-user customer to make a case for the DR solution and not treat it as an afterthought to the migration. This accelerates the end-to-end time taken for migrating and protecting the workloads to support business critical applications.