Data Center Migration Challenges and Relocation Risks: How to Overcome Them

If you manage a data center, you often deal with situations that might seem difficult to overcome. Such frustrations often arise during data center migrations and relocations. There are many things to get right, but also so many things that can go wrong. We’ll look at some of the top data center migration challenges and data center migration risks—and what you can do to avoid and overcome them.

What is Data Center Migration and Relocation?

A data center migration moves IT assets to a new home. It typically involves shifting servers, applications, and data from one hosting environment to another, such as from a company-owned site to a colocation facility.

It could also mean switching an application from an on-premises data center to a cloud platform. Though in some cases, the data center migration is as simple as moving from one server rack to another.

Though data center relocation and migration are terms used interchangeably, relocation usually refers to the physical movement of data center equipment from one site to another. Migration is more of an overarching term. However, their inherent challenges and risks are often the same.

Money is often the key driver in a data center relocation and migration. Businesses might want to save money by consolidating data center sites or benefit from the cloud’s lack of capital expenditures (CapEx), for example.

Top 10 Data Center Migration Issues

Data center migrations are rich with opportunities, yet challenges will always arise. Here are the top ten problems that are likely to be faced:

1. Difficulties in Managing the Migration Project

Small or large, a data center migration is an IT project that requires management. Some person or team needs to take ownership of the relocation project and manage it effectively.

This means overseeing schedules, assigning tasks, setting and meeting budgets, creating accountability, and defining success, among many factors.

2. Managing Costs

Relocating a data center is going to cost a lot of money. Managing costs can be a major challenge as a result. You’ll have to prepare an accurate budget that accounts for all of the people, external services, and equipment required to complete the process, as well as contingencies that can cause unexpected cost increases.

3. Planning for a Successful Migration

A thorough plan is essential for avoiding data center move issues. Planning can be challenging, however, especially if it’s your first time doing a certain type of migration.

For example, if you have not previously migrated an enterprise application to a cloud hosting environment, it may be difficult to know what to expect and how to plan accordingly. Seeking input from knowledgeable people is highly recommended.

4. Staying on Top of Application Compatibility

Applications may not work properly in a new data center due to compatibility issues.

New configurations, new hardware, and operating systems can all “break” applications. Thinking through application compatibility problems should be part of the relocation planning process.

5. Aligning the Relocation with Business Needs

Data center migrations and relocations may take months or even years to plan, but the execution period can be quite brief. It can be a challenge to align the moment of the cutover with potentially conflicting business needs.

For example, the business may want a new system online at the new data center in time for the ”busy season”. However, if the scheduled time for the cutover is too close to the busy season, you won’t have time to tune the system or correct any functional issues in time for it to perform as promised during the peak times.

6. Effectively Testing the Migration

Testing helps you determine whether the proposed relocation plan is going to work before you start cutting over on production systems.

The challenge is to work out the extent of testing you need to perform. If you don’t test enough, you may miss something important and get a bad surprise. At the same time, you can’t test everything, so you have to be selective.

7. Ensuring a Smooth Transition to a New Network Environment

Your relocation plan needs to consider network connectivity. It’s a mistake to assume that IT assets will function well (or at all) in a new network environment.

For example, systems may have hard-coded IP addresses that are not updated in a move, resulting in non-functioning network connections.

8. Managing the Data Migration Part of the Process

Moving the data contained in migrating IT assets is effectively a separate, critically important project of its own.

Data migrations are challenging and need its own plan, testing, and execution processes. It’s also crucial to back up data before moving it, given the potential for data loss in the process.

9. Staying Secure and Compliant

Moving IT assets between data centers can create cyber risk exposure and potential compliance problems.

A cloud migration, for example, typically introduces the “shared security model,” wherein your organization is responsible for securing its applications and data, while the cloud platform is responsible for defending its own infrastructure. It’s important to be clear about who is responsible for the various security tasks.

10. Ensuring No Skills Gaps

New data centers usually mean new infrastructure or platforms. These, in turn, might require new skillsets or people.

The migration plan should take these potential issues into account. If people need training or certifications, it’s wise to get that taken care of well before the relocation.

8 Data Center Migration Risks

Risks in data center migration are mostly mirror images of the process’s challenges. A lack of focus on security, for instance, can lead to a security incident. Other data center move risks are more general in nature, for example, downtime. Here are eight notable risks that deserve attention:

1. Cost Overruns

Unexpected costs are one of the most difficult data center relocation risks to manage. Even with careful planning, you can still get hit with expenses that exceed the budget.

Some fees may be complete surprises. For instance, some cloud storage providers charge data egress fees or calculate API access costs based on hidden interactions, such as verifying data in small chunks during backup. It has even been discovered that 75% of cloud migration projects go over budget (Via McKinsey).

2. Unplanned Downtime

A data center relocation can result in numerous systemic failures, leading to unplanned downtime. Examples include unforeseen incompatibilities between software elements, overloaded network connections that cause applications to time out, or a “mirroring storm,” in which mirror sites try to update each other endlessly and cause the entire environment to freeze.

In the worst case, such downtime can disrupt business operations for an extended period of time.

3. Data Loss

Migrating data, especially large volumes of information, can result in data corruption or loss. This might happen due to a network interruption mid-transfer, mismatched data formatting between source and target at cutover, and more.

4. Performance Problems and SLA Failure

Relocating a data center can easily lead to systems not performing as expected in their new environments. This can result from resource allocation issues, such as with CPUs and memory, as well as network load balancing failures and similar problems.

Performance issues can be a nuisance or a drag on user/customer experience. However, they can also cause failures to meet service level agreements (SLAs), which can trigger penalties or legal disputes.

5. Security Incidents

Moving servers and data to a new site exposes the organization to cyber risks. This can happen in various ways, such as insecure configurations in the new environment or inadvertently implementing insecure controls, like factory default passwords.

Industry research suggests that cyberattacks spike during IT relocations because malicious actors know that the security team will be distracted by the move (via Forbes)

6. Compliance Penalties

Moving a data center may create exposure to compliance risks. For example, a healthcare company could face penalties for HIPAA violations if it inadvertently stores patient health records on infrastructure it does not own.

7. Deficient Backups

Without adequate planning and testing, a data center migration carries the risk of deficient data backup and restoration capabilities.

8. Business Misalignment

Business considerations usually drive data center relocations. Without effective communication and coordination between business stakeholders and the migration project managers, there is the risk that the relocation will fail to align with its business goals, for example, lowering latency for end users.

Steps to Follow for a Flawless Data Center Migration and Relocation

Following best practices for data center relocations/migrations enable you to address challenging issues and mitigate the risks inherent in the process. They include:

• Carefully scoping and budgeting the project based on a combination of business goals and technological objectives and constraints.
• Creating metrics to define success, e.g., meeting the budget and deadlines, but also achieving previously defined end-user satisfaction targets.
• Discovering the business purpose of the migration and aligning the process to achieve the relevant objectives.
• Engaging in thorough data center relocation planning. iterating based on new information to refine the plan, and testing assumptions as the process unfolds.
• Focusing on security and compliance, for example, mapping out how security controls will be affected during the migration and after.
• Building a complete inventory of IT assets that will move in the move.
• Treating data migration as a separate project, with its own processes and success parameters.
• Automating whatever you can using purpose-built relocation tools.
• Using vendor-provided tools, such as those available from enterprise application vendors like SAP.
• Testing the relocation in a sandbox environment before cutting over.
• Backing up systems and data and setting up rollbacks before starting to move IT assets.
• Validating and optimizing the new environment after the migration.

Overcome Issues with a Data Center Migration Risk Assessment

Conducting a data center migration or data center relocation risk assessment is another step you can take to execute the move with as few challenges and as little risk exposure as possible.

The process is similar to what you would do in a cybersecurity risk assessment, except instead of analyzing cyber threats, you’re going to assess the likelihood and impact of risk factors affecting the outcome of a data center migration.

For each risk you identify, the assessment should establish potential negative outcomes, the probability of their occurrence, and their business impact. The result is a chart that looks something like this:

Estimates of impact and probability are likely to be approximate, so low, medium, and high are usually suitable for the assessment. By considering the probability and impact, it is possible to arrive at an appropriate level of focus.

The best practice is to pay the most attention and devote resources to the risks that have the greatest potential impact and probability. This process is similar to the way security and compliance managers allocate people and budget to risk mitigation. By taking this approach, you will be reducing the likelihood of the most serious problems.

Avoid Data Center Relocation Risks with Park Place Technologies

It’s clear that the challenges and risks that come from data center relocations can be damaging. If you don’t have your own in-house team to handle a migration, the likelihood is that your business will be faced with downtime and rising costs.

Park Place Technologies have an expert IT Professional Services division that have multiple years of data center relocation experience. They have handled a wide range of data center moves and have the expertise to overcome the challenges highlighted above.

Contact our team today, to learn how we can help your project.