Monday, April 4, 2016

“Amazon Data Migration Services”

            As technology is advancing and becoming ever prominent in our daily lives, more and more data is compiling, especially for businesses both large and small. This mass accumulation of data in recent years has lead the technology industry to figure out the best ways to store, use, and compute this data. The cloud is the latest data trend, which is “maturing as an operational center for large businesses.”
            Amazon just recently launched their database migration service through their Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to Amazon web services, this new service aims to help companies and individuals “migrate [their] data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.” I found this interesting because it is easy to underestimate the process of transferring data between databases, especially when they are in the cloud and intangible. For example, “companies often copy databases to massive storage devices to be shipped physically to cloud data centers.” By offering a service that will ease this migration of data, Amazon is opening an innovative window for their company to attract users, and also attract them to their database systems such as Amazon Aurora. Additionally, a recent survey found that “58% of companies planned to use Web-based, on-demand computing services, including both public services…and private cloudlike facilities.” This percentage was at a mere 24% just 14 months ago, showing the rapid increase in demand for these web-based services to manage the large amounts of data. This is important because more and more companies are now going to try to integrate and offer cloud service platforms to meet this demand, as Amazon is doing. Oracle and Microsoft are also attempting to simplify the data transfer process for their platforms. However, it appears as though Microsoft’s attempt at this process is to make it easier to transfer data between Microsoft specific database and cloud programs, which is why Gartner Inc. analyst, Lydia Leong referred to Microsoft as a “increasingly sticky vendor.” In my opinion, Amazon’s new service will have the upper hand in regards to this because they are offering “homogeneous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms.” This will be appealing to many businesses that are interesting in switching between platforms and vendors.
            I think this article leaves out some important information in regards to the ways in which Amazon’s data migration service will be simple and easy to use, and the ways in which is it superior to other migration services. In addition, it does not include specifics on how this service will be executed, and what the businesses or individuals will have to sacrifice, like time away from the data and cost. Lastly, security issues were not addressed, such as the potential loss or leakage of data during the migration process, which are both major concerns nowadays.



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