Bridging the Clouds: Why do people need to move data between cloud sites?

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Hi everyone,

I'm Branimir P. Kain, a Senior Product Marketing Manager specializing in Cloud-to-Cloud migrations. Continuing from where my colleague, Swarna Mehta, left off last week, today's post focuses on how our Cloud admins are already using our cloud-to-cloud capabilities to tackle their organizational challenges.

Why do organizations need flexibility in cloud?

Migrating to cloud often involves a careful balance between improving teamwork and considering cost implications, shifting timelines, and other priorities. While a migration to cloud is often seen as a one-time activity, the beauty of cloud technology lies in its flexibility so that the decisions of that one-time activity aren’t permanent. Our cloud-to-cloud data capabilities allow you to continually adapt to your evolving needs. So, what triggers the need for change? We’ve observed three key reasons as to why organizations change in cloud:

1. Seeking efficiency gains: Around 60% of our clients use our cloud-to-cloud capabilities to improve team dynamics and output by reorganizing their data to foster better collaboration.

2. Organizational changes: Whether due to mergers, acquisitions, or internal reorganization, approximately 30% of our clients reflect their new structure.

3. Optimizing for performance & cost: Roughly 10% of our migrations happen because clients want to optimize site sizes for efficiency and optimal use of apps and licenses.

Customer Stories

In the last year alone, we've helped over 8,500+ customers execute 61,000+ plans, copying more than 125K+ projects and spaces and over 10M+ attachments. Of those customers, I wanted to share two anecdotes from two customers who've done cloud-to-cloud migrations already:

Federation

We worked with one major technology customer, with over 8K+ users, who underwent a transformative migration to cloud. Post-migration, during their retrospective, they shared that they wished they had spent more time considering their cloud footprint as they thought they were now locked into the decisions they made - that is, a server-optimized layout in a cloud environment. Now this customer’s comments illustrated two things to us:

1. The importance of reimagining how your cloud footprint should be set up during the assessment phase cannot be overstated. This approach can save you time and money long term.

2. Acknowledging that achieving perfection on the first try is unlikely and having flexibility in cloud is absolutely necessary for long-term success.

This customer had an Enterprise License Agreement; they were able to deploy more sites without going through an onerous procurement process. With an Enterprise License Agreement, you can simply request a new instance of our software and we provide you with that. And as long as you're maintaining compliance within the per-user model, you can deploy as much software as you wish. So, leveraging our cloud-to-cloud capabilities federated what was a monolith cloud site into smaller sites reflecting how their teams were actually working together.

Consolidation

Another customer who had kicked off their migration journey had a server and cloud footprint with over 11 instances across their organization. They believed in better teamwork through centralization, which also enabled their IT and shared services teams to assist end-users more efficiently.

Throughout their migration, this customer performed five cloud-to-cloud migrations, consolidating their instances onto a single cloud site. We gleaned valuabl

e insights from this customer's experience, which led us to invest more heavily in our cloud-to-cloud capabilities.

When we juxtapose these two customers, we can see both are seeking to optimize their footprint for how to drive efficiency in how their teams work; however, with the support of cloud-to-cloud tooling they were able to do opposite tasks - that is, federating and consolidating - to achieve positive gains for their respective organization.

Looking Ahead

Both of these customers helped us pave the way for cloud-to-cloud migrations. Today, our cloud-to-cloud capabilities are more robust, reliable, and resilient, built to perform at scale and continuing to evolve to meet the needs of our enterprise customers. We support more products and product data types, making the process of copying data between cloud sites smoother and more efficient.

Next week, Swarna share some best practices and insight on how to perform a cloud-to-cloud migration! Feel free to drop your questions or thoughts in the comment section below.