In this second of three posts I want to explore some of the common blockers that come up when considering moving to the public cloud and show you how they may be overcome.

It’s common for clients to feel trapped and constrained by their existing datacentres, often believing the cost and practicalities of updating it would prove unworkable, regardless of whether the datacentre is held in-house or outsourced.

I imagine we all want to take charge, release our inner Andy Dufresne and escape. It would however be preferable to take less than the 19 years it took him.

We understand why you might think making the move is too much hassle, costly and complicated.  Of-course, a badly implemented migration could be disastrous but assuming you have spent the time to plan and assess your migration (see blog 1 in this series, which tackles what needs to be considered to devise a sound plan), the process can often be simpler than you think. Time to start digging that tunnel!

Unlike our hero Andy, you are not just armed with a teaspoon to dig a five mile tunnel. Helpfully there are tools that can help you bridge the gap between the data centre and the public cloud and accelerate your migration to the public cloud.

Using Velostrata and your existing VMware management tools you can move business application workloads from on-premises into the public cloud quickly and easily, with a full safety net and easy rollback options. If you are not yet ready to run production services in the public cloud then Velostrata opens up some other exciting options. How about accelerating testing and development by moving applications to and from the cloud in minutes, with many options for handling data. If that’s not enough why not leverage the public cloud for on-demand capacity to meet demand spikes without overprovisioning data centre resources.

The secret lies in decoupling Compute from Storage allowing you to test and run in the cloud without waiting for all your storage / data migration to be completed. Storage migrates in the background, allowing compute to be running in the cloud within minutes. What this means to you is that workloads can be moved from on-premises to the cloud up to 100x faster than more commonplace replication-based approaches.

Red says “I remember thinking it would take a man 600 years to tunnel through the wall. Andy did it in less than 20”.  Maybe you can escape quicker than you think!

You couldn’t be further from the truth.  Velostrata uses agentless technology, which removes deployment headaches – do you really want to restart servers before you migrate them? You have the full choice to migrate servers from within vCenter using just a few clicks or for multi-tier complex applications you can use runbook automation to script server migration to the cloud.

More people digging the tunnel doesn’t necessarily get you there safer or any quicker. Using patented network and storage optimisation technologies Velostrata scales to allow you to perform dozens of physical and virtual server migrations simultaneously. You can also choose where to leave your data, on-premises, in the public cloud or both.

Despite all Andy’s meticulous planning there was a risk. If a migration doesn’t go as planned you can roll workloads back to on-premises in minutes Or simply revert back to on-premises in the future if there is a change in your plans.