Today, businesses generate ever-growing amounts of data and face increasingly urgent pressure to maximize the value they extract from it. In this climate, success depends increasingly on choosing optimal environments for your workloads and making sure your data is stored efficiently and accessibly. Many enterprises are choosing to move workloads to the cloud in hopes of hosting their applications in the most cost-effective and best-performing IT environment available. Selecting the right data migration solution is a key component of the cloud migration planning process and should be considered even in its earliest stages. You can choose among several options for transferring data from a local data center to the cloud, but broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: Online migration, in which data moves across the Internet or a private or dedicated WAN connection. Offline migration, in which data is transferred via a storage appliance that’s physically shipped between its data center of origin and the target cloud storage location.