Data management specialist WANdisco plc is moving to make it easier for enterprises to move workloads to the public cloud.

The company today launched LiveMigrator, a new software product that promises to simplify the task of shifting files from on-premises hardware to an infrastructure-as-a-service environment.

LiveMigrator addresses an important gap: The difficulty of moving legacy on-premises workloads is a major barrier to cloud adoption for enterprises. That’s why the market’s leading infrastructure-as-a-service providers have also been developing solutions to ease migrations.

Amazon Web Services Inc. offers organizations a variety of ways to move their data to its platform, including physical transfer appliances. And Google LLC recently acquired a Sequoia-backed startup called Alooma Inc. to ease migrations for its own customers.

Indeed, LiveMigrator isn’t the first offering of its kind. There are many existing tools that can help automate large-scale migrations. According to WANdisco, what sets LiveMigrator apart is that it resolves a major pain point normally involved in the migration process.

The challenge in question is that data being moved to the cloud typically can’t be changed or even accessed while the transfer is underway. That in turn causes disruptions for the business users who rely on the information. Moreover, the risk of data downtime often forces administrators to carry out migrations piecemeal, which complicates the workflow.

LiveMigrator provides what WANdisco describes as the industry’s first “nonblocking” migration mechanism. The software can stream upward of petabytes of data from an on-premises environment to the cloud without interfering with applications’ ability to access or update records.

LiveMigrator also keeps the records that have been moved to the cloud synced with any copies that still reside on-premises. The software does so by drawing on the features of WANdisco’s flagship Fusion offering, on which it’s built. Fusion records the changes made to a dataset in an internal log and then uses that log to apply the changes to all other copies of the dataset, in this case to the records being transferred to the cloud.

Photo: WANdisco