COVID-19 Accelerated Cloud Adoption. Are You Ready for What’s Next?

By Van Diamandakis
Apr 29, 2021

McKinsey & Company described the coronavirus pandemic as The Great Acceleration in June 2020, noting that “what we are seeing is a great acceleration of trends that existed before the crisis.” Cloud computing and the benefits it delivers for digital business were front and center in this acceleration.

In fact, companies migrated assets to the cloud 24 times faster during the pandemic than before.

Those that had migrated to the cloud for agility and scalability reaped the rewards and that’s one reason why The Great Acceleration exposed how the best companies are getting better and the worst companies are getting worse.

Various cloud computing and storage paradigms, already well on their way to the mainstream pre-Covid, have proven themselves during the stress of the work-from-home (WFH) revolution. And cloud spending has grown accordingly. Synergy Research Group found that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services grew 35% to $130 billion in 2020, and reached $29 billion in Q1 of 2021 alone — up 37% from the same time last year.

Perhaps more importantly, the pandemic has changed attitudes towards the cloud. In a recent survey of over 1,000 enterprise IT executives, 90% said analytics are even more critical now than three months ago. 54% of respondents to a McKinsey executive poll believe that increasing the migration of assets to the cloud will stick post-pandemic.

Cloud computing will remain a focused area of investment for companies post-Covid. For leading companies, they see cloud-based digitization as a key means to widen the gap between competitors. For weaker companies, cloud computing is a lifeline to claw back competitiveness on the path to growth.

Yet key hurdles remain. Constantly-changing, large-scale on-premises data sets make it hard to move these to the cloud without losing consistency or causing business disruption using traditional, big-bang migration approaches.

Business data is living data – it changes minute-to-minute and needs to be available 24/7 without interruption so the migration approach and toolset needs to mirror the modern cloud strategic mandate of flexibility, agility, and real-time data availability.

LiveData Migrator to the Rescue

This is what WANdisco’s LiveData Migrator solution was created to address. Our unique, patented technology fully automates the Hadoop data migration process, enabling non-blocking file system read/write – meaning that even during petabyte-scale migration, applications can still fully access, ingest, and update data. Now, you don’t need to be a Hadoop expert to migrate Hadoop data!

Previous generations of manual cloud migration technologies, mostly based on Distributed Copy (DistCP) required multiple scans to migrate data. This could take months or longer to work, supported by scores of developers or systems integrators, and block users from making changes during the entire period. Now, LiveData Migrator enables seamless migration of petabytes of unstructured data from on-premises data centers to any cloud vendor in one pass. Even as data is moving to the cloud, applications continue to access the existing on-prem environment, while users can choose to direct new workloads or queries at cloud assets.

Already Available from Major Cloud Platforms

Now that data migration obstacles — notably how to move petabyte-scale data to the cloud without stopping business — are no longer a stumbling block to innovation, it’s not a question of how? but rather where? And owing to WANdisco’s close cooperation with the world’s leading cloud providers, the answer is simple: almost anywhere. For example:

• WANdisco LiveData Platform for Azure provides a turnkey solution for Hadoop-oriented data lake migrations to Azure. LiveData Platform for Azure is natively integrated with Azure resources enabling you to deploy and manage your data lake migrations using the same Azure management experience you enjoy today through the Azure Portal and Azure CLI. Most importantly, LiveData Platform for Azure enables you to migrate your Hadoop data into ADLS with zero system downtime or business disruption and is Microsoft’s preferred solution for Hadoop to Azure migrations. \  \ LiveData Platform for Azure comes with two service features, LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure. Both offerings are available on the Azure Marketplace.

• LiveData Migrator for AWS - As an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), WANdisco  has achieved AWS Migration Competency status and LiveData Migrator is offered on the AWS Marketplace. AWS recommends it for different use cases, including Hadoop data migration to Amazon S3 and Amazon EMR, as well as metadata migration to AWS Glue. Available as a free trial for up to five terabytes, businesses that choose AWS can use LiveData Migrator to migrate HDFS data without requiring Hadoop expertise and allow their engineers to focus on AI innovations and other strategic initiatives.

The Bottom Line

Companies unquestionably looked to cloud computing as a robust way to survive and thrive during Covid-19, opening a door to a new era of digitization. The pandemic demonstrated that many enterprise processes can be managed remotely, with the right cloud implementation. And now, with WANdisco’s assistance, getting to the cloud is a whole lot simpler.

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