What Is Data Portability (Data Porting)?

Data portability is the ability to move data between systems with minimal effort. Modern enterprises have varying data storage and access requirements depending on use case, geographical location, regulations, and customer expectations. Data portability enables them to transfer data as needed between cloud service providers and on-premises systems, database engines, and data formats, allowing them to best meet requirements.

Legacy systems often use proprietary data formats and licensing obligations, locking customers into specific systems. This creates complex, technical challenges around data movement, with escalated costs to port out, creating vendor lock-in. Without data portability, an organization's data can only reside on the system in which it is stored. This siloed approach can make data inaccessible and create data quality issues.

Here are some benefits of data portability.

Data accessibility for analytics

Data portability eliminates data silos, enabling data to flow seamlessly from multiple systems into a single central repository, such as a data warehouse or data lake. By creating a single source of truth, analysts have a more accessible system from which to draw their information. Analysts can use a diverse set of tools for business intelligence (BI), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) on this centralized data pool, leveraging it to provide complex insights and decision-making capabilities to other departments.

Enhances data quality management

Data portability involves creating a system in which all data can freely move through your business, so you can ultimately assemble a single source of truth. The downstream effects of centralization mean that you can implement dedicated data quality management tools to screen for data validation, deduplication, and metadata tagging. These tools can remove any duplicate, invalid, or obsolete data to ensure that your centralized data storage system maintains only high-quality, complete data.

Supports regulatory compliance with the California Privacy Rights Act and GDPR

Article 20 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grants every individual the right to data portability. The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), based on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), mandates that when a business receives a verified consumer request to access their personal information, it must deliver that information without fees in a portable format that the consumer can transmit to another business. These data protection laws are primarily consumer protection measures, but businesses with strong data portability processes can better comply with them.

Businesses employ several strategies to implement data portability.

Open data formats

Several non-proprietary data formats facilitate data portability, including JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Parquet, and Comma-Separated Values (CSV). Data warehouses and business intelligence systems widely support each of these machine-readable formats.

Customer choice

Enterprises can implement data portability controls to provide end-users with greater control over their personal information. Here are some options to consider when building consumer-facing data policies and controls:

• Consumers own the data they generate within your systems, including location data from IoT devices, wearable devices, and interaction histories
• Consumers can easily access and transmit personal data in standard, open formats
• Consumers can request the deletion or transfer of their data to a third party at any time

Implementing these controls supports compliance with modern privacy regulations and data portability requests from customers.

Interoperability

Using interoperable formats enhances data portability. It helps make sure that data can easily move between different systems and networks without the need for modification. In this way, interoperable formats support portability. Interoperable systems should also use standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) and connections to facilitate data movement.

Using standard data transfer protocols, such as Server Message Block (SMB), Network File System (NFS), HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), also helps make data movement easier.

There are numerous strategies businesses can use to make sure that data portability remains a priority.

Understand your data

Develop an extensive understanding of the data types and formats your business uses, where data is sourced and stored, and how it is handled. This will help you decide which data transformation and storage systems best fit your organization. With full visibility into all the data in your system, you’ll be better equipped to implement comprehensive data portability processes.

Implement automation

Automating the data transfer methods your business uses incentivizes developers to adopt standardized data formats and protocols. Standardization facilitates automated processes across different systems. Automated data portability systems can:

• Reduce the manual effort of data portability
• Enhance data consistency
• Simplify data migrations across your systems

Centralize data governance

Data governance frameworks determine how your organization manages and uses the data it stores. Centralize data governance, establish reliable company-wide data portability tools, and standardize data policies for retention, deletion, auditing, and access management. Effective data governance helps with effective data portability for more traceable, mobile, and compliant data.

Ensure data quality management

Investigate any data quality issues to find their root cause. There might be an error in your data validation or transformation processes that causes larger issues in your data management system. By resolving these data quality management issues, you can maintain data integrity and make sure that your entire data system remains mobile without issue.

Our customers always retain ownership and control of their sensitive data, including where and how it is stored, and who has access. Wherever possible, we use open data formats with features that make data easy to port.

AWS offers a wide range of database types, each suitable for different types of data. There is no contractual obligation for customers to remain with a single database type. You can:

• Run databases from other vendors on AWS
• Change the type of instance your databases run on at any time
• Export your data from AWS

AWS gives customers the freedom to choose the best-fit cloud services and features available.

AWS provides many tools and documented techniques to support both data migration into and out of AWS. Our services are built on numerous open standards such as SQL and Linux.

For example, you can use:

• AWS Direct Connect to privately connect your data center with a network link directly to your virtual private cloud (VPC) in an AWS region
• AWS DataSync to copy or replicate file system data into Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, on-premise storage, and other systems
• AWS Database Migration Service to migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely, with minimal downtime
• File Gateway to connect existing on-premises applications to cloud storage for files stored as objects in Amazon S3
• Tape Gateway to connect existing on-premises applications to cloud storage for tape backups
• Volume Gateway to connect existing on-premises applications to cloud storage for block volumes

Get started with data portability on AWS by creating a free account today.