You’ve spent a significant amount of time researching which public cloud is the best option for your organization. You then spent even more time and effort migrating your applications to that cloud. You put a lot of effort into building your public cloud infrastructure, but what happens when you need to move that data somewhere else?
There are many technical and business reasons why you might need to move data. Perhaps your cloud of choice didn’t turn out to be the best choice for your needs. Maybe security gaps have recently come to light and you’ve lost trust in the platform. Perhaps the costs of leveraging the cloud infrastructure and services are adding up to be greater than you had anticipated. Or maybe there are particular features, functions, and capabilities that you need that your cloud doesn’t offer, but another cloud does.
Maybe your reasons for moving your applications and data have nothing to do with your public cloud of choice at all. Perhaps you are looking for a disaster recovery solution and want to replicate the data on another cloud. Or possibly your data primarily resides in a private cloud and you are looking to engage in cloud bursting on the public cloud when capacity needs accelerate.
Whatever your reasons for moving your data from cloud to cloud (or even on-premises to cloud and back again), you’re going to run into one major roadblock to a quick win: deciding the best way to get to the cloud.
Refactoring Applications for the Public Cloud
There is a myriad of reasons why you might consider lifting and shifting, containerizing, or refactoring your applications to be cloud native. There are millions of reasons why you might choose one option over the other. But suffice to say: if you want the same performance, features, functionalities, and user experience that you were expecting to receive from a particular public cloud, you’re probably going to need to refactor.
However, refactoring has its own set of problems. It can take months, or even years, of wasted manpower for your IT and dev teams to complete the process. That’s time that could be better spent on more high-value projects that drive revenue. Not only that, but refactoring can be very risky. By completely changing your applications, there is every opportunity for mistakes to be made… and each mistake results in greater delays and higher costs.
But the greatest risk of all is that refactoring your applications to a cloud-native API locks you into a particular public cloud. By rearchitecting your apps to the vendor’s specific set of commands and controls, if you choose to move your applications to another vendor, you are going to need to refactor them again to move them out: meaning more months of wasted manpower and increased risk and cost all over again.
Flexible and Cost-Efficient Data Mobility in the Cloud
Silk offers companies the ease of lift and shift with the performance and UX benefits of being cloud native. By decoupling data from the underlying infrastructure and providing a virtual control and data plane with uniform data services across any cloud, data can quickly and easily be migrated to any infrastructure of choice: whether that be the public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid configuration.
Furthermore, Silk offers a unified, consumption-based licensing model that allows customers to better align costs with actual usage. This model gives companies the agility to meet business needs and ensure that they are only paying for the infrastructure that they are actually using.
