Data migration across tenancies

Data migration across tenancies is a core part of data protection and operations efficiency strategies for cloud application owners and storage admins. Customers migrate data across for the following reasons:

• Migrating data across multiple customer tenancies

• Migrating to new tenancies for operational or business reasons, such as moving service providers

• Protection against ransomware attacks by periodically cloning the volumes to a secondary tenancy. The secondary tenancy uses a different identity provider, and the access to it is restricted. The source tenancy admins can’t delete or modify the cloned volumes in the secondary tenancy.

Crosstenancy data migration is a complex process and requires careful planning to ensure that data is migrated safely, securely, and without any data loss and minimized downtime.

To simplify the data migration process for data stored on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) boot and block volumes, you have two options: Crosstenancy cloning and restoration. Use crosstenancy cloning for data migration within an availability domain and crosstenancy restoration across availability domains.

Crosstenancy cloning

With crosstenancy cloning, you can clone your boot and data volumes stored in a tenancy to another tenancy. A cloned volume is a point-in-time direct disk-to-disk deep copy of the source volume. The volumes in OCI are local to availability domains. When cloned, the availability domains for the new volume is automatically inferred from the original volume. If you want to migrate to a specific availability domain in the same region, you can use crosstenancy restore instead of cloning.

Crosstenancy restore

With crosstenancy restore, you can restore OCI volume backups for migrations across availability domains. OCI volume backups are regional. So, they’re available in all availability domains in a region to restore. You can this option over clones if you want to migrate your volumes across availability domains in the same region. At this time, you can’t copy the backups from one tenancy to another tenancy, but you can only restore the backups to another tenancy in the same region.

Try it yourself

The technical brief, “Data Migration Across Tenancies,” demonstrates the complete process to migrate data across tenancies. Crosstenancy data migration can be a challenging task, but with proper planning and using one of the options listed, you can migrate data from one tenancy to another tenancy with little downtime, safely and securely.