Over two-thirds of organizations plan to increase their cloud computing spending in 20241. More than half of organizations attribute increased spending to factors including cloud services (such as AI), greater resource availability for new business ventures, and migration of workloads from on-premises or private data centers.
Most organizations struggle with challenges to their cloud migration, resulting in stalled projects and cost overruns. Some feel like outright roadblocks. Planning becomes problematic as the difficulties are hard to predict, and the talent needed to address surprises is in short supply.
Any cloud migration is enormously complex, so it’s essential to find solutions to simplify the task ahead with each application your organization is migrating.
OpenText™ InfoArchive is purpose-built to address these challenges head-on. InfoArchive is a direct response to an organization’s need to keep migration costs and project timelines to a minimum, simplify infrastructure, and manage long-term compliance and data access requirements.
Here are some common roadblocks posed by cloud migrations and how OpenText InfoArchive addresses each:
- Not all applications can be migrated effectively or at all. Applications built on Visual Basic, older multi-tier architectures or even mainframes may be difficult to transfer to the cloud due to antiquated environmental assumptions or licensing issues. If these applications are not accumulating or processing data, InfoArchive can help you retire them and archive the data while providing search, viewing, security, storage, and compliance for this data.
- Cost to maintain scalability and performance. Many existing applications may have scalability and performance characteristics that are unnecessarily costly as they don’t efficiently take advantage of cloud services. InfoArchive is designed expressly to exploit scalable, distributed cloud architectures and is integrated with native cloud databases and storage services. It scales resources in real-time, as necessary, to provide the most efficient use of computing and storage costs going forward.
- Security requirements may be impossible to resolve. Due to limitations in the architecture, data security requirements may prevent legacy applications or data from being moved to the cloud. InfoArchive is a modern, cloud-first architecture that meets stringent security requirements and can encrypt data and content with a customer-managed key.
- Transitioning dormant, business-complete data into modern cloud applications is expensive. Cloud applications may charge hefty fees for live data in applications no longer in use. InfoArchive can take on this dormant data’s long-term retention and legal hold requirements so that only active data is transferred to updated cloud alternatives.
- Regulatory Compliance. Data retention, data sovereignty, privacy, legal hold, and security requirements evolve regularly and can create complexities for governance and IT that are struggling to comply. InfoArchive is designed with flexible data compliance for both structured and unstructured data that eases the load and provides the year-over-year flexibility necessary to keep up with changing requirements.
- Skill gaps. Legacy applications often require highly specialized knowledge after retirement, even if virtualized in the cloud. These systems require maintenance, upgrades, and specialty user support each year. Maintaining this expert knowledge rather than shifting resources to active systems is a huge drain on IT budgets. InfoArchive consolidates and simplifies the infrastructure and usage of this data into a single platform with longevity, freeing resources to learn and support forward-looking applications.
[1] 451 Research, Posey, M., Public cloud budget expansion continues in 2024, 2024.
