Some of the tools relating to multi-cloud migration need to be improved as they have a very limited capability at this point in time. These tools are suitable for one-to-one migration scenarios but they are not fit for multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments. I would like to point out that I don't have a hands-on very large scale production implementation experience, as that is the job of our infra team.

As I mentioned earlier, we find it very difficult to use these tools in a multi-cloud environment but they work well for single-cloud environments — from an on-premise environment to the public cloud. These tools are quite limited, making things much more complex in a multi-cloud environment.  

They should add a feature that supports multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environment migration properly. The world is going to be very different five years from now, how will they support these kinds of container-based migrations? Currently, infrastructure as code is very limited. It's not as simple as just moving the server or data. The customer wants you to move the entire application, exactly as it is, and then deploy it. From that perspective, these tools offer only part of the solution, they are not fulfilling the holistic need, which the customer or organization needs. As of now, Carbonite Migrate is helpful on an infrastructure level. If we had to move 100 applications across a multi-cloud environment, then this solution would not work. 

In the cloud-world (the migration part of it) there needs to be better automation. Let me explain: automation refers to your infra, app, and data. Together, these three components combine and automate will provide you to deploy faster on any cloud platform. As of now, this tool doesn’t fit too much into a multi-cloud environment cloud data migrations. Together, these three components combine and automate it allowing you to deploy it. As of now, these tools cannot deploy it into a multi-cloud environment. That's where the challenge is; that's for other tools. We need to see what this product can do in terms of app, data, and infra. It is automated from the infra point of view, but not in regards to the app and data. 

Other vendors understand this problem and have taken the necessary steps to address it. In short, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments pose a problem for this solution. I would like to know how I can take the automated path — data, app, and infra all together. That is something they need to enhance.

Recently, I have seen a lot of other companies implementing AI-based automation, where more things are taken care of by AI itself, and not people. Many of these migrations are too complex for humans to analyze and form solutions. It is better to use AI platforms to create recommendations and then automate them, that way you can reduce the burden. Currently, the migration time is vast, from six months to one year, it would be impossible to do 100 application migrations. This is very time consuming and needs to be improved. 

Migration in RHEL and Linux environments can be improved. During RHEL migration with multiple data areas, you have to create a similar source environment at the destination. This can be challenging because you have to install it, create the VM, install over it, and mount it at the mount point. Only then can you do the migration. 

As a prerequisite in the case of a Windows platform, the .NET framework may cause some challenges as well. This can be done only in the latest version and is not possible in the earlier versions. We could do the migration for a customer with the older version but only after upgrading to the newer version of the .NET servers. This requires application downtime, and if the customer does not want any downtime during the migration, it can be very challenging.

I would also like to see improvement in the data analytical loopholes in terms of Linux migration.