Migrating Enterprise GIS Data to AWS Cloud - Strategies
By : Abdel-Hadi Hor, Geospatial Architect, TransformaTEK


           One of the most challenging aspects of moving to a cloud deployment is transferring data from your local (on-premises) environment onto the cloud. Our services can help through you this journey, we will look at your environment and provide you with all applicable scenarios, given that data is the cornerstone of successful cloud application deployments, an evaluation and planning process may highlight the physical limitations inherent to migrating data from on-premises locations into the cloud. TransformaTEK Geo-spatial Enterprise solutions team offers you services and tools to help you move data in a safe, guaranteed way to the cloud taking advantage of the convenience and scalability of the cloud environment to host your data, apps and services. End users typically do not need or want to log on to instances in AWS to get their work done; they'll still use applications on their local devices to work with data through services.

Major data migration Challenges

For your data to go from your machine to commercial cloud services such as Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3, it must go "across the wire", meaning it is transferred through the Internet onto the cloud-based server. This can pose the following issues:

1.     GIS datasets may be so large that they are not feasible to transfer across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time. When moving large datasets to the cloud, you must plan for enough time to move the dataset and, if possible, increase your bandwidth. After doing a test transfer of a few hours or days, you should be able to get an idea of the rate of data transfer, and you can thereby extrapolate how long it would take to transfer the entire dataset.

2.     Low bandwidth/slow internet makes it impossible to transfer your data in a reasonable amount of time Cloud-based data centers like Amazon's are built to handle high levels of data traffic coming in and out. However, your connection going out to the cloud may be limited by a slow connection or lack of available bandwidth. Some IT departments and internet service providers (ISPs) throttle or cap the amount of data that can be transferred from any one machine or node in the network. However sometimes these policies can negatively affect legitimate business needs such as transferring data to the cloud. If you find yourself in a situation with low bandwidth, we can explore whether your data transfer could occur during off-hours such as nights or weekends.

3.     Your data may be sensitive enough that transferring it across the Internet would require extra security measures or is not an option altogether: Confidential or proprietary data-sets, such as health records, may require extra security measures for transfer to the cloud. Other types of data-sets may be okay to host on the cloud but must be encrypted during transfer, to prevent a malicious party from using any data that may be stolen en-route to the cloud server. Secure socket layer (SSL) connections (HTTPS) and secure FTP are two techniques for encrypting data for Internet transfer.

Data Migration Methods


1-     Ingest and Egress with AWS-S3 transfer acceleration

 2- Using CloudFront to ingest Data into AWS

3- Using AWS S3 Buckets




There are many other methods to migrate your organization contents to the cloud .. they can all be customized based on your needs and flows your pace. In case you need an assistance or help with your data migration to AWS cloud that takes your environment into consideration, contact us to schedule your free onsite presentation and open floor discussion