Cobalt Iron Compass Migrator for Automating Data Migration from Legacy Backup Environments

Cobalt Iron Inc. announced the availability of Compass Migrator, a new capability of the Compass enterprise SaaS backup platform.

Large enterprises are using Migrator to gain control of their backup operations and data, move to a most modern backup technology available, and maintain custody control of their long-term retention data. It enables companies to remove aging backup and storage technologies from their environments, while reducing investment in obsolete skills and giving them greater control over their data.

Businesses have struggled for years with trying to manage large amounts of legacy backup data.

Some of the biggest challenges are:

They don’t know how much or what data resides in their legacy backup and storage infrastructures.
They don’t understand which data might still be valuable and need to be maintained.
Undisciplined policy management over years often leads to dozens, or even hundreds, of inconsistent retention policies.
Companies often are not even sure they can recover some old backup data, but they keep it ‘just in case.’
Businesses want to migrate to the latest data protection and storage technologies but are locked in with current products due to large amounts of legacy data.

Companies moving data to new backup or storage products typically must analyze legacy data to try to determine what data should be kept and then perform manual and labor-intensive movement of data, sometimes object by object, with a multistep process of recovering the old data and then backing it up to the new infrastructure. After doing all that, they often must maintain the legacy data and infrastructure anyway to satisfy data custody requirements, leading to higher costs and a need to maintain archaic technology skills.

Unlike other backup products, which do little or nothing to assist customers in moving off their legacy platforms, Migrator brings ease and automation to the inherently complex and challenging problem of data migration. It is flexible in what, when, where, and how data is moved from the legacy environment.

Through levels of automation, visibility, and data governance control, Migrator:

Selectively identifies data to be migrated (e.g., only particular types of data, for certain systems, by date range, active data only, etc.).
Allows customers to automatically migrate valuable backup and long-term retention data from legacy backup environments into multiple storage targets (including to new data centers or the cloud) within the modern Compass solution.
Optimizes the migration processes (e.g., minimizes tape mounts, dynamically manages a migration staging area, manages throughput, allows massive parallelism for large data amounts, etc.).
Rebinds long-term retention data with appropriate retention policies.
Provides migration progress indicators, details, and migration validation analysis.
Maintains data custody-tracking throughout the entire migration process and beyond.
Provides summary and analysis reports of all migration operations as audit evidence.
Enables an easy migration path off legacy tape.
Supports migration restarts in the event of failed migration jobs or scheduled maintenance activities.

“As a user of this remarkable Compass Migrator tool, I am amazed by how it simplifies the management of numerous data migrations from multiple sources and targets,” said Graham McGivern, deployment coordinator, Cobalt Iron. “With real-time status updates and progress-tracking, it has transformed the way complex data migration processes are handled, providing unparalleled ease and efficiency. It’s truly a game-changer.”