Subscribe

Selecting cloud migration tools

By Fay Humphries, Events programme director
Johannesburg, 26 Aug 2014
Finding out about a product's lack of migration capabilities in an emergency is a very bad experience, says Mike Khattab, VP sales: growth markets at Vision Solutions.
Finding out about a product's lack of migration capabilities in an emergency is a very bad experience, says Mike Khattab, VP sales: growth markets at Vision Solutions.

Corporates considering moving to the cloud should select migration tools with the diversity to take them wherever they need to go.

Mike Khattab, VP sales: growth markets at Vision Solutions, offers this as his top advice for companies considering shifting to the cloud and wanting to ensure both the safety of and ease-of-access to their data.

Vision Solutions provides cloud protection and recovery, high availability, disaster recovery, migration and cross-platform data sharing solutions for Windows, Linux, AIX, IBM Power Systems and cloud computing. Khattab believes corporates should choose their migration partners carefully.

"If you have to go physical to virtual, or physical to cloud, or cloud to cloud, you want to be sure you have the tools with the diversity to go in any direction. Finding out about a product's lack of migration capabilities in an emergency is a very bad experience," he adds.

Investigating a provider's storage diversity is also critical, he states. "This is because we've seem viruses and malware that are targeted for a specific manufacturer's storage. So, if the cloud storage provider has multiple providers of storage in its data centre, the chance of one virus disabling the hardware is lower."

Commenting on cloud computing adoption by local companies, Khattab says: "We see a lot of innovation in the South African market, relative to the other local geographies, as well as lots of virtualisation and private cloud deployments.

"Among the South African organisations who have recently implemented our solutions is the Manufacturing, Engineering and Related Services Sector Education and Training Authority (MerSETA), which needed to replicate and secure data at a remote location."

"Our data is a critical part of our organisation's ability to support businesses in how they are developing skill sets for their employees. Double-Take from Vision Solutions provides us with a simple and effective disaster recovery platform for protecting that data," says Fabian Brown, ICT manager at merSETA.

Vision Solutions lists TCM, Idwala, BP British Petroleum, UMC, Fujitsu, Nestle Waters and more than 18 banks worldwide as among its global customers.

Vision Solutions will host a half-day cloud resiliency event, along with IDC, Microsoft and IBM, in Johannesburg later this month. Topics to be addressed include high availability and disaster recovery migrations in hybrid environments, risk migration and consolidating data centres, as well as Microsoft Azure and IBM Softlayer.

Click here for more details about the Cloud Resilience Executive Forum event.

Share