Data migration trends illustrate the pain points and opportunities in data management. In our modern, data-driven economy, data managers face the challenges of exponentially growing data repositories and the need to replace legacy data storage solutions. These challenges force data migration to new solutions capable of handling more data.
Meanwhile, the value of data mining drives data scientists to demand ever-increasing access to data as well as the ability to investigate the data in detail to extract deeper insights. The types of data also continue to change as new sources are included from the Internet of Things (IoT) such as video, audio, and sensor data.
Some legacy solutions that might have excess data capacity won’t have the flexibility to handle the new data sources. This incompatibility provides another force driving the adoption of data migration tools.
5 Trends in Data Migration
Companies progress at different rates and will migrate for different reasons. The five major trends in data migration reflect the mass recognition of the benefits from data migration to solve specific problems.
1. Continued Shift to the Cloud
Given the universal surge in the quantity of data, large enterprises quickly exhaust the capacity of local hard drive arrays. Data managers struggle to juggle constant demands for additional capacity and to keep ahead of hardware obsolescence and failure.
Migrating data to the cloud will not completely eliminate these issues, but they reduce the urgency and the complexity. Mouse clicks on the cloud interface easily replaces the hours of installation, configuration, testing, and troubleshooting required to install physical hard drives. The ease and potential automation of scaling storage provides a strong appeal for data managers and powers the trend to move more and more data to the cloud.
The largest companies continue to exceed their current capacity and Markets and Markets expects these large enterprises to continue to dominate demand for data migration in total dollars. However, small and medium-sized enterprises are expected to drive the fastest-growing segment of the data migration market as the flexibility of the cloud becomes more widely recognized in 2022.
2. Data-Driven Migrations
Data migration has been around as long as we have had data, and our data must stay intact even as the media fails. Whether our modern data manager is moving data from local data centers to the cloud or between cloud resources, data managers seek to improve costs, performance, and accessibility with their next solution.
However, as managers transition their data, effective data managers also seek to move the right data to the right place. Instead of simply recreating their existing data storage solution at a larger scale, data managers now seek to transform the data into more useful configurations.
This transition serves higher goals than simple storage. Data managers seek to improve analysis, integration with other systems, and more. For example, instead of replicating the local storage for 20 subsidiary offices, an enterprise might create global repositories by data classification: global marketing, operations records, logistic records, security log files, etc.
To improve the use of data, data managers will execute data migration for specific subcategories of data to specific tools or locations.
3. Unstructured Data Migration Surging
Data analysis only used to work on structured data. Now, with the continuously improving processing power of cloud resources and the leveraging of artificial intelligence (AI), unstructured data can be incorporated into a wide variety of data analysis.
Unstructured data simply means files or data outside of a database. The data could be as small and easy to process as a text file or as complex and unwieldy as a video file with multilingual audio content.
With increasing computing power, IoT video feeds, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF invoices, and many other files can now add to our analysis and provide new insights to data scientists. However, to do so, these files need to be accessible to analysis tools. This is leading to the demand to migrate old and new unstructured data into new data repositories for analysis.
4. Shifting Demand Markets
Markets that already recognize the value of data migration, such as the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industries, are predicted to continue their heavy use of data migration. Similarly, marketing departments across industries are expected to retain their position as the market leaders in adoption and use of data migration to improve their data analysis capabilities.
However, as understanding of data migration advantages spreads, the fastest growth now comes from new industries and roles. Markets and Markets expects human resources to be a segment that grows quickly as HR executives look for data migration to consolidate multiple data sources for better data analysis.
Similarly, retail and consumer goods are industries anticipated to show the highest growth as they seek to improve their understanding of customers throughout a product and customer life cycle.
We can expect this shifting demand between industries and job functions to continue as the advantages of data migration and data analysis become more widely understood. While we might not be able to predict next year’s fastest growing segments, we can certainly anticipate continuing change.
5. Data Modernization
While past data migrations may have simply moved data from one repository to another, data analysis improves in efficiency and effectiveness when AI doesn’t need to waste cycles figuring out what is in the data. This need drives data modernization, which involves moving data migration from legacy databases to modern databases.
Using data modernization, unstructured data becomes classified and structured and old databases become restructured and refined. In a recent Deloitte survey, 84% of respondents have started data modernization processes with the BFSI industry leading the demand.
The companies that performed the first data migrations to the cloud now become active participants in data migration related to data modernization. This helps maintain the established industries as leaders in the data migration marketplace.
For example, marketing departments may have been the first to migrate data into the cloud to perform data analysis, but now they are also leading the way to transfer data from one database to another chasing the benefits of scalability, cost reduction, flexibility, performance, and expanded functionality.
