There is no better time than now to migrate your on-premise storage to the cloud. Using the cloud offers a lot of benefits such as easier collaboration, no hardware management or upkeep, and greater accessibility. There are several cloud storage platforms available each with their own strengths and weaknesses such as Google Workspace, Box, and SharePoint. Moving your on-premise storage to the cloud doesn't have to be hard, because with Movebot we make it easy.
First thing is first, where do you start? There are a lot of reasons to move into the cloud in a post-Covid world. We cover some of the most common reasons in our article Why you should move your file server to the cloud, such as Cost Efficiency, Performance, and Security.
Moving to the cloud requires preparation, and the more prepared you are the less of a disruption the move will be. For your cloud migration plan, New Relic has a solid checklist that can help ensure a smooth transition. This encompasses an architecture role, through to baselines, refactoring, and creating the actual data migration plan. While the plan has a heavy emphasis on planning due to complexity, using a data migration tool like Movebot can significantly reduce how much planning you need to do because it can handle many things that used to be issues automatically.
With COVID-19 showing that remote working with cloud collaboration is possible, many organizations are looking to move on-premise storage to the cloud. There is really no excuse not to move to the cloud and continue down your digital transformation journey. More and more clouds are becoming compliant with security standards and reside in most countries to ensure data sovereignty is maintained.
For example, Box is great to use for collaboration and content management, with security robust enough that the majority of Fortune 500 companies use it in some form. Box Shield not only detects attempts at infiltrating the storage through threat detection but also unusual location access and more. There are also other players like Wasabi Cloud, who have an affordable hot cloud storage that is superb at storing large amounts of data.
Some cloud storage companies like Dropbox are also HIPAA and HITECH compliant, so even highly-secure files of this nature can be stored in the cloud nowadays. With greater security and compliance in the cloud, there are now fewer reasons to stay purely on-prem.
Although the cloud offers a lot of benefits, there are still some advantages and reasons that organizations are keeping on-prem file servers. Security and control are one reason, as data isolated to an on-site server is much harder to access, as long as the server isn't exposed to the wider internet.
When on-premise storage is still needed, moving files as a backup to cloud storage can still offer some advantages. It's recommended to have some kind of backup and disaster recovery plan in place, especially with ransomware and other cyber threats, not to mention the risk of the on-premise server bugging out. Even if the organization wants to stay mostly on-prem, at least having an offsite backup can help mitigate a disaster and potential catastrophe.
If you're doing a hybrid solution, Once your data is finally in the cloud, there might be the need to keep it up to date, or synced between your current on-site infrastructure and the new cloud storage. One tip is to make sure whatever solution or third-party product you choose to get you there also supports the sync of new and modified files. Some tools specialize in this syncing, but keep in mind the on-prem server will need to be able to connect to cloud storage to sync of course.
Now comes the methods, there is an array of methods in getting yourself to the cloud. But which is best for you? Often the cheapest option isn’t always the best, as there are other flaws whether it be corruption, security, or overall transfer performance.
A tool like Rclone, for instance, is free to use, but the costs come from other places. While there's no charge to use it, there's a cost of time, resources, and management, and it requires a high technical competency to run properly. For smaller migrations with a simple hierarchy this could be a perfectly fine solution, but add in terabytes worth of data and millions of files across NAS devices and it quickly becomes unfeasible and much more risky.
Another option is to use a data migration tool. Depending on which cloud storage platform you're moving the on-premise storage into, there might be a sponsored tool you can use to move your data into it for free. Some storage platforms offer this service to get you into the ecosystem so you'll start becoming a paying customer, but then that tool only works one way. And even when designed for getting your data from on-premise to the cloud (to that specific storage mind you), there may be a lot of prep work and setup that you need to do on your own first, adding to the time and resources required.
Or you can use Movebot, a data migration tool that does on-prem to the cloud a better way. Movebot is completely platform-agnostic, aiming for top performance no matter which of the 30+ storage platforms you choose to migrate into.
Movebot is a simple-to-use web-based tool that you can trust. Movebot is SOC2-compliant and never stores your data, giving you added security for moving your files to the cloud. You have no infrastructure to manage and can choose to have your data moved by nodes stored throughout the world such as Australia, Frankfurt, or the United States, including a HIPAA-compliant option.
When moving from an on-prem file server, Movebot employs an easy-to-use lightweight agent that runs as an executable. There is both a Windows and OSX version so you can move either server type to the cloud. Setup only takes a few minutes and you can move your file server to SharePoint, Google Workspace Box, Dropbox, or any of the over 30 storage integrations that are supported. Once connected, you can move from on-prem to cloud storage just like any other storage that Movebot supports, as long as the agent is active and running on the target device.
As Movebot is completely self-service, you log in, connect your source and destination storage, set some additional settings, and start moving your data. It's fast, simple, secure, and gets the job done. Follow Movebot's simple 3-step Plan, Advance, Cutover migration process to move your on-premise storage to the cloud the easy way.
Movebot's simple PAC migration process strips the complexity out of on-prem to cloud migrations. Below is a quick overview of the process, but for a full rundown of everything Movebot can do in these three steps, check out the article The 3 stages of a Movebot migration.
Plan is the first step, where you decide what data you want to move and how you want it to look in your cloud storage. With Movebot, you don't have to move everything on the on-prem server to the cloud in one huge move, and Movebot will guide you through selecting what you actually want to move. This is especially useful when working in a hybrid environment and you only want some of the data to be migrated.
Advance is the second step. When setting up your project, you'll be guided on how to map users and folders, and Movebot encourages you to run several small transfers, as you don't have to migrate everything in one massive transfer operation. Instead, choose which folders you want to move at what time and let Movebot do its magic.
Cutover is the final step. Once you have the bulk of the data migrated from your file server to the cloud, run delta migrations to move the rest of the data across. Deltas will move both new and newly-modified files, so you can be confident that all the data you want will be moved into the cloud.
Movebot simplifies on-premise to cloud migrations by doing all the heavy lifting for you in a simple 3-step migration process. All you have to do is plan out your migration, add the agent to the server and start moving data, then bring across the rest of the files with delta migrations. It's really that easy.
Want to see how Movebot works for yourself? We keep this same simplicity across everything at Movebot, including starting a free trial. You don't need to go through several rounds of calls to see how it works, or even a single call. In fact, you don't even need to add a credit card. Simply register for a free 14-day trial, and you can connect your platforms and see how easy it is.