Cloud is becoming the destination of choice for many applications, whether new or legacy. If you are adopting a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, how easy is it to migrate your legacy applications to the cloud and/or leverage the cloud for disaster recovery (DR)?
When it comes to moving workloads or entire environments to cloud, the process of getting it right is much more complicated than just replicating data. There is a long checklist of tasks, with multiple dependencies, required to bring up your environment at another location. This makes the entire process manual and error prone. Get any of these steps wrong and the new environment may not launch properly, or even worse extend an already critical outage or disaster situation.
When talking to customers and industry experts here are some common challenges we hear about moving to cloud:
Manual process
Have a server or VM environment with dozens or hundreds of machines? How many steps are required to bring it all up? What dependencies, sequencing, and custom configurations are required? For most, bringing up an entire environment requires dozens or more steps, many of them with multiple dependencies. This is just too complex a process to be managed manually.
Error prone
Human and process errors happen – improper change management can make things worse. Having a way to detect errors and changes while validating that your process is still valid is key to success.
Incompatible formats
As cloud becomes more popular, and major providers stake their ground with their own formats and APIs, it becomes harder to keep up and maintain interoperability. This is especially true if you want to operate a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. You want to look for solutions that can help you convert various VM formats and interoperate between cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Costly to move
The larger your environment, the more data you have to move. This calls for efficiency both in data transfer and storage as both will show up on your cloud bill. Leveraging data efficiency technologies like deduplication, compression, and erasure coding – and look for ways to minimize your data footprint are key.
Destined for Failure
Do you have a DR runbook? If so, how is it documented? When was it last tested? A recent Spiceworks survey found that 5% of participants do not have a DR plan – and of the ones that did, 29% have never tested their plan. That’s a good way to set yourself up for failure. Having a solution that allows you to quickly design and visualize your plan, while giving you the ability to automatically test and validate it, will surely improve your success rate.
Multiple point solutions
Yes, DR and migration tools exist today. However, they are typically suited for one vendor or platform, on-premises OR cloud, or just one use case – i.e. you’ll need seperate tools for DR and migrations. This only adds more tools to the mix and more complexity for you to manage.
Automate data management with Cohesity Runbook
Cohesity Runbook offers a solution to automate cloud migrations and disaster recovery challenges. Cohesity Runbook is an automation and orchestration tool that’s available on our MarketPlace. It installs directly on your Cohesity DataPlatform, and runs from the Cohesity management console.
Runbook automates hybrid-cloud mobility and disaster recovery. It makes moving a single application or an entire environment easier and more reliable. Complex and manual tasks become a thing of the past with Runbook’s orchestration engine, which manages workflow timing and dependencies to speed execution and recovery time. Runbook enables you to quickly design workflows in minutes with an easy to use drag and drop graphical design canvas. It encapsulates best practices and makes moving and failing over workloads across hybrid clouds more reliable and less error prone. To help tie into the bigger picture, Cohesity Runbook provides APIs to integrate with infrastructure automation tools of your choice.
Today is just the beginning of what Cohesity plans to offer for automation and orchestration. Runbook ultimately provides the foundation to build upon a vision to automate anything, anywhere for app and data infrastructure. Imagine automating your dev/test environments or automatically spinning up a sandbox to test for ransomware or security threats.
Read more from our Runbook press release here and learn more on our website.
