More Than Half Migrating Live Data to the Cloud are Shipping It by Truck

WANdisco announced the launch of its annual Hadoop-to-Cloud Migration Benchmark Report, showing that most data migrations still rely on “old school” approaches and tools involving shipping data by truck to cloud vendors (56%) and/or using tools not designed for on-premises to cloud migration such as DistCp (48%). As a result, more than 54% of migration projects have not gone according to plan with 24% not completed on time,  11% not within budget, and 20% missing the mark on both.

“These manual migration tools strain resources, add complexity, and ultimately increase risks to the business,” said WANdisco SVP Marketing Van Diamandakis. “This DBTA survey shows that companies are not taking advantage of technologies that can ease the transition and mitigate risks in moving to the cloud. As we look to the future, the next wave of data migrations will be larger and more complex as companies seek to implement hybrid and multi-cloud data infrastructure. The outdated nature of these migration techniques puts companies’ data and business at risk, and will soon become obsolete.” 

The survey found that most IT leaders are pursuing cloud migration to lay the foundation for future business value creation. Data modernization initiatives (78%), cloud scale analytics (61%), and adopting scalable cloud storage (49%) were the top three Hadoop-to-cloud migration drivers, pointing to a desire for more agile capabilities – despite using outdated technologies to get to that stage. Many respondents expressed the expectation of using hybrid environments for the foreseeable future with 42% planning to maintain a hybrid environment for one to three years, and another 36% planning to maintain on-premises Hadoop environments indefinitely.

Other key findings from the survey:

• Over 73% of respondents intend to migrate on-prem Hadoop to the cloud
• Over half of these have not yet started
• Companies with 5,001-10,000 employees show highest intent to migrate (48.3%)
• 21% claim to have fully completed the process
• Companies with over 10,000 employees have highest completed percentage (27.9%)
• 52% expect their on-premises Hadoop data volumes to grow over next year
• 6% expect significant increases
• Only 24% expect decreases
• Of companies with highest intent to migrate, 46% have more than 5PB of data to migrate

The survey questioned over 200 technical professionals from the Global 2000 in May 2021 currently using Hadoop, or who have previously migrated Hadoop data lakes to the cloud. Respondents included C-level employees (e.g. CIOs, CTOs), cloud and data architects, IT and analytics directors or managers, and others within data, development or management roles within their organization.

Get the complete 2021 Hadoop-to-Cloud Migration Benchmark Report here.