It’s A Multi-Cloud World, After All
In the early days of cloud computing we spent a lot of time defining the difference between public cloud (Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.) and those which we classified as private cloud (those located on-premises, in a single enterprise).
We then quite quickly realized that most customers would benefit from a mix of the two. Public cloud for its expansiveness and (almost) infinite ability to scale and grow — combined with private cloud for sensitive data, governance issues and so on. This logically became known as hybrid cloud.
Where we sit now is one rung higher up the ladder, that is – we assume that all businesses will need to adopt a certain amount of both public and private cloud computing and so be essentially hybrid. But we can also say that these customers will have now refined their use of cloud computing to get some of what they need from one public cloud provider and some of it from another — and we call that shopping around deployment approach multi-cloud.
Strictly speaking we should probably refer to multi-cloud as multi-hybrid-cloud, if can safely assume that some data will always still be kept on-premises, but the industry doesn’t like to explain it that way. Instead, the focus of multi-cloud is on the separation of cloud workloads happening in a more independent way from each other across different cloud providers. This prevents vendor lock-in, but in theory it can also makes integration harder.
As a result of these trends, we’re seeing tech vendors now come to market with tools designed to address the big multi-cloud challenge i.e. what data do you put where to get the most value out of it in the most efficient way?
One such player is Scality. Describing itself as a company focused on distributed file and object storage and multi-cloud data control, Scality has now produced its Zenko 1.0 to be a cloud-native multi-cloud data controller. Available in open source and enterprise editions, Zenko provides a unified interface to store, manage and search data across multiple disparate private and public clouds, enabled by advanced metadata search and an extensible data workflow engine.
Essentially this is a product designed to provide a single endpoint through which data can be stored, retrieved and searched across any location.
Scality CTO Giorgio Regni explains that software application developers building cloud applications don’t have to choose a single provider or worry about coding to multiple Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). He says that Zenko opens opportunities to design applications where storage doesn’t need to be pre-selected up front and is chosen based only on the needs of the business, such as cost, availability, or specific analytic capabilities.
So cloud computing was all about achieving flexibility and connectivity in the face of data complexity and increasing complex IT workloads that connect to services emanating from all sorts of different service providers — who knew?
Whether we call it multi-cloud, multi-hybrid-cloud or cloud-combinados (well, it might work in Spanish at least), what we do know is that enterprise customers are now increasingly focused on being able to shop around for their cloud resources. But, at the same time, they will always be looking for a single source of truth (or at least a single view of all data silos) so that they know what information and processing they have in any given place at any given time.
