Companies Are Bringing Data Back from the Cloud. Now They Need a Place to Put It
In this special guest feature, Shridar Subramanian, Vice President of Global Product Management and Marketing at StorageCraft, discusses the trend called “cloud data repatriation,” and how it appears to be gaining steam. A rethinking is happening where companies are looking to return at least some of their core data and applications to their on-premises data centers. StorageCraft is a global provider of data management, protection, and recovery solutions. For more than two decades, Shridar has helped to bring innovation to the market that helps organizations successfully build I.T. infrastructures. He is an innovator of technology that turns data from an operational challenge into a key strategic asset. Shridar joined StorageCraft with the acquisition of Exablox in January 2017. He holds an M.S. in computer science from Penn State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Until recently, if you weren’t in the cloud, you were nowhere. Companies were racing to move their applications and data to the cloud, expecting to reap the benefits of reduced costs, increased flexibility, and greater collaboration, to name just a few. However, now a rethink is happening. Companies are looking to return at least some of their core data and applications to their on-premises data centers. The trend is called “cloud data repatriation,” and it appears to be gaining steam. IDC reports that 80 percent of organizations repatriated workloads last year and that, on average, companies expect to return 50 percent of their public cloud applications to hosted private or on-premises locations over the next two years.
So what’s driving this surprising turn of events? First and foremost is the fact that the cloud isn’t quite the silver bullet it was hyped up to be. In many cases, moving all data to the cloud is not as cost-effective, secure, or scalable as many organizations anticipated.
Sure, public clouds offer a higher level of flexibility, but they can be surprisingly expensive, especially where data storage is concerned. As well as being costly to store in the cloud, it often proves both slow and costly to download data sets from the cloud when they’re needed on-prem. The cloud also has a history of being too slow and costly for the transmission of edge data, such as unstructured data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This unstructured data is growing at hyperspeed. Indeed, IDC predicts that the total of the world’s data will increase from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes by 2025 and that 80 percent of that data will be unstructured. Those are head-spinning numbers and companies, understandably, are struggling to keep up.
Just when organizations think they’ve got a handle on their data, more and more of it comes flooding in, whether it’s email and multi media phone messages, audio files, video files, text files or social media posts. Moreover, machine-generated data, as well as data created by IoT devices, is adding new and more massive waves of unstructured data to the mix.
