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Bridging the Gap: Synchronizing On-Premises Data Centers and the Cloud with AWS Data Migration Service (DMS)

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Introduction:

In today’s hybrid IT environments, where organizations operate both on-premises data centers and cloud infrastructure, synchronizing data between these environments is critical. AWS Data Migration Service (DMS) offers a powerful solution for bridging the gap between on-premises data centers and the cloud. In this article, we will explore how you can leverage AWS DMS to synchronize changes between your on-premises data center and the cloud, ensuring data consistency and enabling real-time decision-making.

 

Setting Up the Replication:

To synchronize changes between your on-premises data center and the cloud, you need to set up replication using AWS DMS. Begin by deploying an AWS DMS replication instance in your AWS account, which serves as the migration engine. Configure the source endpoint for your on-premises database and the target endpoint for your cloud-based database service. AWS DMS supports various source databases, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Ensure that your on-premises database is accessible from the AWS DMS replication instance.

 

Change Data Capture (CDC):

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a crucial feature provided by AWS DMS for real-time data synchronization. By enabling CDC, DMS captures and replicates only the changes made to the source database, ensuring that the target database remains up-to-date with the latest data. CDC can be configured at the table or database level, depending on your requirements. This capability minimizes data transfer and reduces the impact on network bandwidth, allowing near real-time synchronization between the on-premises data center and the cloud.

 

Network Connectivity and Security:

To synchronize changes between the on-premises data center and the cloud, a secure and reliable network connectivity is essential. AWS provides Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Direct Connect services to establish secure connections between your on-premises network and AWS cloud infrastructure. It is crucial to configure network security groups, firewalls, and routing rules to allow traffic between the on-premises data center and AWS resources. Follow AWS security best practices and ensure encryption of data in transit to maintain data integrity and confidentiality.

 

Monitoring and Managing Replication:

AWS DMS provides monitoring capabilities that allow you to track the progress of replication and detect any issues or delays. Utilize the AWS DMS console or leverage AWS CloudWatch to set up alarms and notifications for critical events. Monitoring replication latency, throughput, and error rates helps you identify potential bottlenecks and take proactive measures to optimize the synchronization process. Regularly review replication logs and metrics to ensure the health and performance of the replication tasks.

 

Handling Data Conflicts:

During the synchronization process, it’s possible to encounter data conflicts between the on-premises data center and the cloud. Conflicts can occur when the same data is modified in both locations simultaneously. AWS DMS provides conflict detection and resolution mechanisms, allowing you to define conflict resolution rules based on your business logic. By establishing clear conflict resolution strategies, you can ensure that data integrity is maintained and conflicts are resolved according to your defined priorities.

 

Disaster Recovery and High Availability:

Synchronizing data between on-premises and the cloud also enhances disaster recovery and high availability capabilities. By replicating data in near real-time, you can maintain a replica of your on-premises database in the cloud, enabling quick failover in case of a disaster. This replication approach ensures business continuity and minimizes data loss. Additionally, the cloud provides scalable and highly available infrastructure, which enhances the overall reliability and resilience of your data architecture.

 

Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness:

AWS DMS offers scalability and cost-effectiveness for synchronizing changes between on-premises data centers and the cloud. The service allows you to scale the replication instances based on your workload requirements, ensuring optimal performance during peak periods. Moreover, AWS offers a pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to pay only for the resources you use. This cost-effective approach eliminates the need for significant upfront investments in infrastructure and provides flexibility as your data synchronization needs evolve.

 

Conclusion:

AWS Data Migration Service (DMS) provides a robust solution for synchronizing changes between on-premises data centers and the cloud. By leveraging the power of DMS, organizations can achieve real-time data synchronization, enabling faster decision-making, enhancing disaster recovery capabilities, and embracing the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud. With proper planning, network connectivity, and monitoring, AWS DMS empowers organizations to bridge the gap between on-premises and the cloud, unlocking the full potential of a hybrid IT environment.

Infor Feeds into Digital Strategy at Nutreco

Infor recently announced that Nutreco, a global leader in nutritional solutions and services for the aquaculture and animal nutrition industry, has deployed Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Per the press release, Nutreco showcases of the scalability and robustness of Infor’s public cloud services and multi-tenant industry cloud platform. Fully integrated with Nutreco’s third-party systems, the platform (labelled “Unite”) facilitates standardization and the creation of worldwide aggregated reports. These provide insights to improve integrated business planning cycles for the feed leader and manage the most effective stock levels and deliveries on time. Additionally, Nutreco’s digital strategy was looking for a global cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that could consolidate, contextualize and communicate critical information for 3,600 users. The new Infor Unite platform harmonizes business processes and de risking operations. In addition, functionality, maintenance, operations, security, and legal updates are all deployed automatically to ensure Nutreco’s solution is always current. Moreover, sustainability sits at the heart of Nutreco’s strategy and agenda, and the company has been publishing an annual sustainability report since 2016. All relevant data points are organized within the Unite system in a multi-dimensional, tagged format, which enables Nutreco to generate transparent and automated sustainability reports effortlessly.

 

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Advantages to Hosting ERP in the Cloud

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In recent years, the popularity of cloud computing has grown exponentially. With businesses moving their applications and data to the cloud, there has been a significant shift from on-premise deployment to cloud-based deployment. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are no exception to this trend. More and more businesses are moving their ERP systems to the cloud. In this blog post, we will discuss the advantages of hosting your ERP in a cloud environment over an on-premise environment.

 

Scalability

One of the biggest advantages of hosting your ERP system in the cloud is scalability. With cloud-based ERP, you can easily scale up or down based on your changing business needs. Whether you need to add more resources, users, or functionality, cloud-based ERP systems make it easy to scale up or down without any disruption to your business operations. This scalability feature is particularly beneficial for small to medium-sized businesses that are experiencing rapid growth.

 

Cost-effective

Another significant advantage of hosting your ERP in the cloud is cost-effectiveness. Cloud-based ERP eliminates the need for significant upfront investment in hardware, software, and infrastructure. With cloud-based ERP, you only pay for what you use, making it a cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes. Additionally, cloud-based ERP systems require less maintenance and support, reducing the overall cost of ownership.

 

Improved Security

Security is always a concern when it comes to hosting sensitive business data. Cloud-based ERP systems typically provide better security features than on-premise systems. Cloud providers often have dedicated teams of security experts who work to ensure that their infrastructure is secure. They also provide regular software updates and patches, ensuring that your ERP system is always up-to-date and protected against the latest threats.

 

Accessibility

Cloud-based ERP systems provide users with the flexibility to access the system from anywhere, anytime, using any device with an internet connection. This feature is particularly beneficial for businesses with remote teams or employees working from different locations. With cloud-based ERP, users can access the system from anywhere, making it easy to collaborate and stay connected.

 

Better Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is another area where cloud-based ERP systems outperform on-premise systems. Cloud providers typically have redundant systems and data centers, ensuring that your ERP system is always available, even in the event of a disaster. Cloud-based ERP systems also provide automatic backup and recovery, reducing the risk of data loss.

 

In conclusion, hosting your ERP in a cloud environment offers several advantages over an on-premise environment. Scalability, cost-effectiveness, improved security, accessibility, and better disaster recovery are just a few of the many benefits of moving your ERP system to the cloud. If you’re considering moving your ERP system to the cloud, make sure to choose a reputable cloud provider and consult with an experienced ERP consultant to ensure a successful migration.

Gulfsands Goes Live with Financial System Move into the Cloud with Infor and Progressive TSL

Infor recently announced that independent energy company Gulfsands has deployed Infor SunSystems Cloud as its financial platform via Infor Gold Channel Partner Progressive TSL. Gulfsands is already seeing increased security, reduced risk, and improved functionality and performance. Per the press release, with a multi-tenant model, the smaller IT footprint will minimize administration and task duplication, enabling easier, more consistent access across the world, and a sharper, more-informed focus on its core business goals. It also eliminates the environmental impacts of maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure. Gulfsands, being London based and with recent openings in Abu Dhabi, UAE, opted for a cloud deployment to take advantage of having no physical servers, with reduced risk, cost and improved security as a result, as well as the updated functionality and capabilities in the latest version of SunSystems. Further, the cloud delivers a much easier way of supporting an increasingly dispersed workforce, as users can now access the system seamlessly from wherever they are in the world, which will be a huge benefit as the company scales.

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17 New And Enhanced Challenges That Can Come With A Multicloud Strategy

With growing technology means growing companies. The hot topic today is moving to the cloud. The latest trend with this is adopting a multicloud strategy, a move that comes with multiples benefits  – if done right of course. There are challenges involved in a multicloud strategy, but none that cannot be tackled head on to prevent future issues. Member of the Forbes Technology council share some of the challenges that can come with managing a multicloud strategy, with advice on how to help businesses through each issue to ensure multicloud success.

  1. Managing Data Security And Compliance. “One challenge in managing workloads across multiple cloud environments is ensuring data security and compliance. Businesses can prepare for this by implementing robust security policies, utilizing encryption and access control measures and conducting regular audits to ensure adherence to industry standards and regulatory requirements.” – Remo Peduzzi, ICR Informatik AG
  2. Avoiding Data Fragmentation. “In today’s business landscape, scaling your company naturally leads to an increase in the amount of data generated, processed and stored, making cloud environments a necessity. However, this growth in data can result in fragmentation, making it crucial to take control of your data through automation and standardization before it becomes unmanageable.” – Daniel Korogodski, First Bridge
  3. Ensuring Reliable Tenant Access And Resource Security. “Leveraging cloud technology across multiple cloud environments will enable business continuity in the event of downtime in any one of the environments. Two of the challenges l see will be maintaining access to the tenants and possible security issues. To prepare for this change, businesses should ensure that tenant access and resources within multiple cloud environments are adequately secured.” – Nihinlola Adeyemi, ErrandPay Limited
  4. Ensuring Integration And Compatibility Between Different Platforms. “Ensuring seamless integration and compatibility between different cloud platforms is an understated challenge. With the increasing popularity of multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies, businesses may find themselves using multiple cloud providers, each with its own set of tools, APIs and interfaces—blending all of them is a gargantuan engineering hurdle in itself.” – Prashanth Balasubramanian, Striga
  5. Getting The Most Out Of A Multicloud Strategy. “Taking cloud-native approaches to developing applications and incorporating good design principles from the beginning can help companies make the most of multicloud services. Instead of focusing on managing workloads, it is better to design applications to take full advantage of the capabilities of cloud services. Embracing containerization through infrastructure as a service instead of traditional workload management can be beneficial when serverless architectures are not suitable.” – Brad Mallard, Version 1
  6. Monitoring Permissions. “In my experience, basic controls are still an issue for many cloud deployments. Monitoring permissions for corporate data stored in AWS, Azure and other platforms is a fundamental control that is often reviewed only annually. This leaves corporate data at risk if permissions are not set correctly.” – John Bruggeman, CBTS
  7. Managing FinOps. “Organizations are on multicloud platforms to avoid vendor lock-in or to manage business demands (or sometimes even by accident). Whatever the reasons for a multicloud strategy might be, FinOps—matching the available cloud budget with costs across the divisions within an organization—is the pinnacle of all the multicloud challenges organizations face. CFOs often lack a real-time, “single pane of glass” view of the budget versus spending trends across cloud platforms.” – Srini Gajula, Sage IT INC
  8. Controlling The Cost And Complexity Of Collaboration. “One problem with multicloud setups is the cost and complexity of making them work together. Many providers make it prohibitively expensive to move data out of their clouds. In such cases, multicloud setups are not truly multicloud, as people are unable to take advantage of what each cloud offers. This makes simplicity, support, documentation and an open platform important, particularly for startups.” – Yancey Spruill, DigitalOcean
  9. Balancing Cost And Carbon Optimization.  “One challenge that comes with a multicloud strategy is trying to balance minimizing costs and carbon optimization. The pace of change and agility demands faster analysis of where to place a workload to minimize both the cost and the carbon footprint.” – Travis Greene, Micro Focus
  10. Supporting Both On-Premises And Cloud Applications. “We’re witnessing fragmentation across the data landscape in terms of technologies, vendors and use cases. Organizations can’t operate in silos anymore; we have to be ready to support applications that are hosted both on-premises and in the cloud. Only with common tools and approaches will we see the efficiency gains this offers, allowing us to improve productivity and spend more time creating value.” – Jakub Lamik, Redgate Software
  11. Auditing Infrastructure Security. “When data is scattered across multiple clouds, it is vulnerable to data breaches. As cloud providers constantly add new features to meet customer needs, IT teams must continuously audit and manage their infrastructure to ensure their cloud environments meet security requirements. Some best practices include strong encryption and automated monitoring tools to simplify the audit process.” – Parvinder Walia, ESET
  12. Coping With Increased Security Complexity. “While a multicloud strategy comes with many benefits in terms of the ability to use the best cloud service provider for the workload, technology and cost, it increases complexity in terms of security. Since each cloud platform is different, cloud defenders need to learn multiple technologies, and they often end up using separate security tools for each provider, complicating policy alignment and increasing workloads.” – Avi Shua, Orca Security
  13. Managing Machine Identities. “Managing machine identities is a significant challenge for multicloud environments. Modern workloads driven by DevOps, containerization or Internet of Things devices often require an extremely large number of machine identities in the form of digital certificates or keys. Without robust management, oversight and automation, outages, security problems or even breaches can occur.” – Ted Shorter, Keyfactor
  14. Optimizing For The Strengths Of Different CSPs. “Companies using multicloud strategies or delivering cloud-native technologies must be thoughtful in optimizing for the strengths of different cloud providers, seeking out the best models for data storage, GPU performance, tightest integration with end-user suites and, of course, support for security capabilities and tools. There are differences, and prioritizing usage based on need is critical.” – Devin Redmond, Theta Lake
  15. Overcoming Data Gravity. “Data gravity is the newest challenge. It can make moving data between cloud providers difficult, leading to delays and complexity in workload management. By building microservices with high availability in each cloud environment, businesses can optimize data processing and storage for each environment, reducing the need for data movement.” – Darren Person, Circana
  16. Codifying Infrastructure. “As cloud environments grow more complex, infrastructure as code becomes more and more important. Codifying your infrastructure means you can tear an environment down and spin the entire thing back up with the click of a button. By codifying your infrastructure now, you will position yourself well to manage workloads that span multiple cloud environments in a scalable and secure way.” – Tim Mitrovich, Artisan
  17. Managing Cognitive Load. “Cognitive load is becoming more of a challenge as the answer to every question continues to be “shift left.” Where will enterprises turn to find employees who can set up and secure networks while also writing code and managing deployed applications? Some estimates indicate that developers spend 20% of their time working on infrastructure rather than writing code that solves business problems.” – Rick Kilcoyne, CloudBolt Software

 

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Scandi Standard Standardizes with Infor Cloud

Infor recently announced that Scandi Standard has chosen Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, multi-tenant cloud solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to consolidate and standardize its core processes. With operations in five countries and sales in over 40 through subsidiaries, Scandi Standard’s existing business systems lacked the industry adaptation needed to ensure that the ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution could support all core processes in a harmonized way within the group. Per the press the press release, Infor’s standardized platform allows Scandi Standard an opportunity to more quickly introduce new technologies into the group and future-proof its development. Additionally, the group chose Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, ensuring the business can benefit from continuous updates with minimal administrative burden on the internal IT team.

 

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Saudi Lime Selects Infor Cloud to Help Drive Digital Transformation Strategy

Infor recently announced that Saudi Lime Industries Co. (SLIC) has selected Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), to help simplify and automate its business and processes.  Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise will boost SLIC’s ability to optimally meet surging demand for its products, and support Saudi Arabia’s economic diversification in line with the aims of Saudi Vision 2030. Per the press release, SLIC developed a digital transformation strategy called SPARK, which included a plan to simplify its operations, raise efficiency, and capture and analyze valuable data to gain operational and market insights to further improve performance. Further, SLIC selected Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise as its ERP solution because it met these needs and more. The solution is preconfigured for SLIC’s industry-specific needs and will help it achieve a shorter implementation and therefore faster time to value by gaining visibility of its business and transform the processes required to quickly respond to customer, supplier and regulatory needs — with no software customizations required. It also will allow SLIC to integrate with its suppliers, partners and customers, helping it anticipate issues such as supply chain bottlenecks or upcoming changes in demand.

 

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How To Keep Your Data From ROT-Ing In The Cloud

It’s a brand new year and while it’s not yet the time for “spring cleaning”, you should still consider cleaning up your data. While we can easily brush this time-consuming task aside, understanding and cleaning up your data can save you cloud storage space. Simon Jelley, General Manager for SaaS Protection, Endpoint and Backup Exec at Veritas Technologies, shares an article on Forbes of the importance in managing and keeping necessary data in the cloud. At some point every bit of data was of importance to your company. But as years pass and data retention and compliance comes into play, a lot of that historical data is useless. Jelley coins the term “ROT”, an acronym to describe the three types of antiquated data you may still be storing – data that is redundant, obsolete, and trivial. “Just as rot often takes hold in organic things due to neglect, ROT data results from neglecting good data management practices. As much as a third of enterprise data can be considered ROT (and another 52% is dark data with unknown value, at least a portion of which is almost certainly more ROT),” says Jelley. ROT data can pose many risks to your business such as security, compliance, and liability. Not only that, having unnecessary data means you’re paying for high storage sizes. Below are four steps that Jelley outlines for rooting out your ROT data.

  1. Create a data taxonomy or classification system: “This is a set of definitions, labels and groups to organize your cloud-based data. This will help you identify ROT data.”
  2. Establish a single source of truth (SSOT) location for each category of your cloud data. “This is where the “right” version of each data asset is saved, reducing the chance that ROT versions exist elsewhere in the cloud.”
  3. Define policies for managing the ROT data you’ve identified. “These are rules and procedures you set for purging the ROT from the cloud.”
  4. Remember that this is an iterative process. “Continually update your data taxonomy, manage your SSOT location on an ongoing basis to ensure it’s being used properly, and regularly execute on your ROT data policies with the procedures you’ve established to get rid of it.”

While this process may be a huge project, Jelley concludes how necessary it is and it promotes good organizational management for your business.

 

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Saudi Diesel Embraces Cloud-based ERP to Support Equipment and Power Generation Market

Saudi Diesel Equipment Co. (SDEC), the Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia-based leader in diesel power generation, transportation and support equipment manufacturing, recently announced their decision to migrate its existing deployment of Infor M3 on-premises to Infor CloudSuite Equipment. This would enable them to improve and automate business processes raise efficiency, and boost its ability to innovate. Moving to the cloud is part of SDEC’s wider digital transformation project, Digi-Step, as the company scales its operations to support strong demand for equipment, machinery, and power generators across a range of sectors in Saudi Arabia. Per the press release, SDEC had been using an on-premises version of Infor M3 as its ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution for more than 12 years, but wanted to migrate to Infor CloudSuite Equipment powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company will benefit from using Infor’s OS cloud operating platform while also consolidating its processes around a more comprehensive CloudSuite solution, which includes the Infor Birst business intelligence data analytics solution. Additionally, moving to the cloud and replacing various legacy systems from other vendors with Infor solutions allows SDEC to simplify, automate, and gain visibility of business processes including supply chain management, production, financial management, stock taking, and after-sales service. This, in turn, will transform the company’s ability to work efficiently and integrate with partners including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to deliver the specific solutions customers want. Further, the move to a multi-tenant cloud environment also will allow SDEC to benefit from integrating with other Infor products and continuous innovation from Infor, with software updates and upgrades taking place automatically as soon as Infor implements them, without the need to perform manual updates at set intervals.

 

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Top 11 benefits of cloud computing

Even though the likely trend for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform points towards the cloud, there are still some business leaders reluctant to migrate. Valid concerns such as data retention, security and other risks are usually the case for the indecisions. Despite these concerns, there are still so many benefits (some addressing the aforementioned concerns) for moving to the cloud. Darcy DeClute, Agile coach & Scrum Master at Scrumtuous Inc, shares an article on TechTarget of the top benefits of cloud computing, and why  your business should consider making the switch.

High availability. “A highly available system is one that experiences negligible downtime. Downtime is typically counted in seconds rather than minutes or hours, since cloud-based services rarely go down.”

Reliability. “Reliability describes how well a service performs the tasks it promises to do. It ensures highly available databases don’t randomly corrupt records or delete messages. Cloud providers routinely upgrade, update, patch and test their systems to make sure their services perform as promised. They further guarantee the reliability of their services in SLAs.”

Scalability. “In the cloud, you can scale your architecture in minutes and with the click of a button.”

Elasticity. “You can scale cloud-based services as needed. AWS provides a specialized Auto Scaling tool that helps companies dynamically rightsize EC2 instances, Aurora DB and NoSQL databases. An organization with a highly seasonal business, for example, could have millions of dollar’s worth of hardware and software sitting idle during slow months. That’s not a good allocation of capital.”

Agility. “One of the cloud computing benefits developers love is that it frees them from the time-consuming chore of managing infrastructure.”

Cost savings. “In the cloud, capacity planning is no longer guesswork. You simply scale up and down as needed. You don’t have to spend millions of dollars up front for software licenses or mainframe servers. And you’ll never run into the problem of having bought too much hardware.”

Global reach. “To reduce application latency, a data center should reside near its users. With cloud-based services, you can deploy applications into any region on the globe. You can also use edge locations around the world that have the power to cache data and further reduce application latency.”

Pre-certified compliance. “Pre-certified compliance is one of the biggest benefits cloud computing can bring to highly regulated industries. AWS, Azure, Google and IBM cloud-based infrastructure comes pre-certified in a multitude of fields.”

Enhanced security. “Some detractors suggest that moving data and applications to the cloud creates a security risk, but that is not the case. Take AWS, for example: All data that flows across the AWS global network is automatically encrypted. Most AWS services, such as S3, provide the option to encrypt all data at rest, so that if a data storage device is compromised, the information on it is indecipherable.”

Automation. “Every AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and IBM component comes with an API interface that makes it fully programmable. Developers can create, configure, query and destroy cloud-based resources with SDKs written in Java, Python, JavaScript and C++.”

Environmental sustainability. “You don’t generally think of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud as leaders in the fight against climate change, but there would be a positive impact on the environment if smaller companies moved their infrastructure into the cloud rather than running its own less-efficient data centers.”

 

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