Don't Let Your Legacy IT Hold You Back: Accelerate Migration with Data Virtualiz...

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In our ever-changing technology environment, new opportunities are everywhere. These new technologies help delight your customers, speed innovation, and optimize operations. But migrating from your legacy IT infrastructure can be risky. And efforts often drag out, delaying these key business benefits.

Is There a Way to Migrate Successfully, Faster, and With Less Risk?

Most people think of data virtualization as a high productivity, low-cost way to integrate data for analytics. However, it is also very effective at legacy infrastructure migration. 

The key to data virtualization’s migration success is how it decouples data sources and consuming applications by inserting a flexible middleware layer that isolates your users from “migration moving parts.” This simplifies legacy migration while enabling a phased approach that reduces risk. 

From “As Is” to “Will Be” and Everything “In Between”

When you use data virtualization to help migrate your legacy infrastructure, you should think about a phased approach rather than a big bang cutover. For example, you might phase your migration of selected data domains when migrating sources. Or you might phase your migration of selected users and/or analytics when migrating consumer applications. This allows more controlled builds and validations, easy rollbacks if needed, and avoids big bang cutovers. 

The phased approach starts by identifying the future “will be” state and any “transitional” states in between.  

Next, insert data virtualization between your data sources and consumer applications. This forms a layer of insulation that allows: 

• Migration of legacy data source technology to new source technology without impacting legacy consumer applications and their users. For example, migrating from an on-premises data store to a cloud data store.
• Migration of legacy consumer applications to new consumer applications without impacting legacy data sources or application users. For example, migrating from traditional BI tools to more self-service visual analytics.

As a result, you can modernize your infrastructure quickly, with low risk.

Seven Ways Data Virtualization Accelerates Migration

Data virtualization provides seven key capabilities you can use to accelerate and de-risk legacy migration.

1. Migrate without Impacting Your Business Processes
Data virtualization’s decoupling of data sources and consumer applications, even as you migrate them, assures continuity of your daily business operations. 

2. Migrate Diverse Data Sources and/or Application Consumers 
Data virtualization non-invasively integrates data from any data source anywhere across the extended enterprise—in a unified, logically virtualized manner—for consumption by nearly any consumer application.

3. Migrate Legacy Data No Matter How Complex, Big or Old
Often legacy data is managed within complex structures that is old and difficult to integrate. Because data virtualization excels in its ability to access, transform, and deliver a wide range of data, this is less of an obstacle. 

4. Accelerate Cloud Migration
Data virtualization also insulates analytics sources and users during cloud migrations by inserting abstracted data models between data sources and user applications that safely adjust the source data access without impacting the consuming applications, and vice versa.

Read this whitepaper by Mike Ferguson of Intelligent Business Strategies on how to accelerate your cloud migration with data virtualization.

5. Keep Your Data Secure
Data virtualization’s authentication and authorization security functions protect your data from improper use before, during, and after migration.

6. Mitigate Risk with Trial Runs and Phasing
Lifting and shifting source data to a new data store is a huge effort. As is the effort to rework all the applications that consume these sources. It doesn’t always go right the first time. Instead, you can apply data virtualization’s agile development methods to both create and test virtual data views in a separate environment. And quickly refine these views as required. 

7. Complete Your Migration Effort Quickly
Think in terms of weeks, not years. Your data engineers and application developers will enjoy using data virtualization. It is easy to learn and use, and can automate many of the tasks required. Development and deployment is fast and easy with data virtualization. Simple migrations can take just a few weeks.

Most people think of data virtualization as a high productivity, low-cost way to integrate data for analytics. However, it is also very effective at legacy infrastructure migration. Click To Tweet

Migrate Faster, with Less Risk

With so many new opportunities, the case for migrating your IT legacy has never been stronger.  With data virtualization at your side, you can migrate faster with less risk.

So take advantage of these new technologies and trust data virtualization to get you there. Check out these resources to learn more about data virtualization in general, or how to use it to accelerate cloud migration, in particular.