Moving to and within the cloud
The importance of using data lineage and blueprints to avoid unintended consequences
Few businesses haven’t started the process of cloud migration. But that’s the thing: it’s a process, not an event, and a highly complex, risky and time-consuming one at that.
Moving data or systems to the cloud is not a one-off decision but something requiring continual monitoring to ensure that yesterday’s decision is still right for the business today.
To tackle this in a way that preserves your sanity, you need to understand the entirety of your data estate and how it maps to your business functions. This is where lineage and blueprints, the subjects of this whitepaper, play such a crucial role.
Data Lineage
Data lineage weaves its way into every aspect of data and systems management, and, by extension, cloud migration.
The concept of data lineage is very straightforward: it’s simply a description of a piece of data’s journey, one that outlines where it first came into your organization’s databases and systems, and its stops along the way.
However, it gets complicated for several reasons, not least because it undergoes changes along the way. Similar records in different databases may, or may not, relate to the same entity, and linear paths are rarely smooth and one-dimensional.
Data Blueprints for scenario planning, impact analysis and more
A blueprint, specifically in the context of cloud migration, is an interactive visualization of how your data flows and its connection to the obligations that regulate it, your policies that guide it and your processes that create or use it.
The insights and intelligence from having this landscape view, and an understanding the level of interconnectedness of your applications and data repositories, will enable you to budget appropriately and plan accordingly – accelerating your program timelines by making the ‘unknown known’ much more quickly than traditional current state assessments.
It’s far better to understand and then migrate than it is to migrate and then try to understand; decisions must be scientifically informed, not based on gut feel or, worse, ignorance.
Download the whitepaper for:
- An overview of lineage
- Guidance on how to use blueprints for scenario planning, impact analysis and more
- Notes on regulatory considerations
- A handy pre-migration checklist
