Data Migration with a Remote Workforce

They are counting on you. You can count on us.

The unprecedented times we are living through have brought many realities into sharp focus. As our first responders and healthcare workers race to care for the people our communities, the other essential members of our society have also continued to face the challenges of this time. Delivering goods, serving customers at grocery stores and pharmacies, keeping our public infrastructure operating seamlessly, and supporting the other essential elements of our lives, it is all harder with the additional risk of COVID-19. Behind the scenes making everything function flawlessly are the silent IT professionals that are scrambling to support the new remote workforce requirements.

Digital transformation has been a core mission for those in the IT world for years. Our economy functions in large part due to the systems and technologies that form our digital foundation. With the advancement of technologies, our societies have grown to demand more, faster and has evolved further to include delivery of entertainment on demand all while now, enabling the work force to perform their jobs from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, while some organizations have systems in place for employees to work from any location, at any time – very few were equipped to support a completely remote work environment. Overnight, all non-essential businesses either closed or moved to a work-from-home mode of operation. Organizations have stretched the limits of their global IT systems and have greatly exceeded those thresholds in many situations.

IT professionals are scrambling to adjust. The worldwide community of IT professionals has embraced the challenge and is pulling off some true heroics. The organization, BCS, is currently running a campaign to highlight the extraordinary efforts of our community with its hashtag #vITalworker. It is worth reviewing a few of the highlights on Twitter.

All of this connectivity does have a material impact on the data storage demands. Many of our customers are trying to balance data storage initiatives. How quickly they can add new storage or move data non-disruptively to another location has a significant impact on the services they can deliver to end-users.

While our customers depend on us for critical services, our team can support these deployments remotely. For anyone required in the office or onsite, we are taking every precaution to keep our employees, customers, their families, and our communities safe. Thankfully, CDS’s solutions require little or no onsite work. Our network of professionals can deploy our appliances non-disruptively in a few hours.

Our customers or their partners then access a range of capabilities to minimize the effort. This includes being able to migrate “hot data” to a new, more powerful array, with no downtime. It encompasses any block storage, any storage architecture, local, remote or cloud, any operating system, and any fabric. Additionally, some organizations are harnessing our new data management functionality to add replication to their current block array with any other block array, enhancing their resiliency. The result is full copy data protection with zero RTO and near-zero RPO. Copy data management provides simple, limitless copies regardless of the storage platform.

To all those working tirelessly on the frontlines to keep our communities safe, healthy, and protected, we thank you. For all our IT heroes working around the clock to keep us connected, we support you.

If you know an IT hero, be sure to post their story on Twitter with the hashtag #vITalworker. Now more than ever, we see that we are all in this together.