Tackling Your Multicloud Strategy in Five Steps
The customers I speak with these days are typically dealing with two distinct yet related challenges. First, they’re having to store, manage and make sense of more data than ever before. Second, they have more options than ever before to do this.
With applications and their associated data now residing in multiple locations—from customers’ on-premises data centers to edge locations and hyperscale public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform. This means customers are rapidly adopting multicloud strategies, which can deliver significant benefits around flexibility and agility. But they can also create new data management challenges.
Successfully implementing your own cost-optimized and easy-to-manage multicloud data management strategy comes down to five critical steps.
Many organizations lack a well-defined way to manage their data across heterogeneous environments. Some may even take a one-size-fits-all approach, starting with a single cloud and applying that same methodology enterprise-wide. The risks of this shortcut are limited collaboration, governance concerns and integration challenges.
Becoming a cloud-driven organization doesn’t end once you’ve amassed all the best cloud environments. It’s a journey, not an end-state. A clear strategy is absolutely key for adoption and evolution of your cloud environments. Consider interoperability and flexibility, which will help you be more strategic with resources and ultimately lead to better multicloud ROI.
In a multicloud environment, the complexity of data management can escalate exponentially. Without a clear plan, organizations often duplicate data, which can lead to waste and overspend. A data management strategy can consolidate and simplify data and workload portability. This can help inform the way you ingest, process, store and analyze data from multiple locations—on-premises, across multiple clouds, or from a range of endpoints.
A central, unified data architecture can greatly reduce data management complexities. Centralized storage management will ideally include an operating environment that works seamlessly on-premises and in cloud environments.
The ability to migrate data and applications between data domains is essential. However, on-premises and cloud environments are very different and don’t always speak the same language. The same can be said for different cloud environments. The resulting data silos can create management and efficiency challenges that can lead to friction and limited collaboration in a broad range of use cases.
To break down silos and get seamless data mobility, your operating environment should have a software defined storage solution that enables you to create a common infrastructure with a unified data plane. Non-negotiables include consistent APIs and an efficiency guarantee in writing depending on workload.
Cost efficiency remains a top reason IT executives stay on-prem.
