Setting the Right Data Management Strategy for Hybrid and Multi Cloud

Published on 03 April 2018

Cloud migration is a critical component of every organization’s digital transformation strategy. However, a number of limitations and challenges inherent to the cloud at the present prevent it from being the one-stop-solution for all data storage needs of organizations. Under these circumstances, enterprises are forced to follow a more conservative strategy, wherein businesses utilize both cloud and on-premises digital infrastructure to store, use, and analyze data. This is called the hybrid cloud strategy.

Hybrid Data Storage and Management Challenges

It is often the case that enterprises utilize more than one cloud solutions vendor to store and manage their data (multi-cloud environment). Not to mention a complex mix of in-house systems, where the data is stored in silos, separated from one another. Such a diverse set of data management systems pose a number of challenges for IT departments.

1. Data Awareness

Firstly, they have to keep track of all the enterprise data that is now spread across multiple systems. In today’s data-centric organizations, data is the driver of innovation. A robust data-driven strategy allows businesses to innovate and improve their products and services to meet the customer demands before the competition. Moreover, data can help businesses develop competitive advantage in an increasingly cut-throat business landscape. All enterprise data should be leveraged efficiently and effectively to attain business goals. Therefore, businesses cannot afford to have blind spots of data they possess. It is imperative that they are aware of all the data they possess and where it is stored.

2. Data Access

Secondly, the data has to be stored in such a way that it can be accessed and used seamlessly. Business success is significantly dependent on the agility with which businesses can access, and analyze data to drive product improvements. Hence, it should be effortless for businesses to access and analyze all the data with them. Even the slightest downtime will result in a significant impact on the organization’s capabilities to respond to industry challenges.

Benefits of A Hybrid Approach in Data Management

A number of cloud data management services and solutions have sprung up to address the abovementioned challenges and many others. The focus of these services and solutions is to enable businesses to keep track of all of their data spread across multiple on-premises and cloud systems, and access the data seamlessly. In other words, these services offer an integrated environment, wherein all the enterprise data is easily accessible, without any barriers and irrespective of where that data is stored.

This integration platform as a service (iPaaS) model has gained immense popularity as enterprises are increasingly leveraging multiple cloud solutions to manage their data. However, not all such services offer the capabilities required for the success of modern businesses. Therefore, it is essential to consider the most critical elements of a good hybrid data management solution to analyze the various vendors’ offerings in the market and select a compelling player and solution.

1. Deduplication and Storage Optimization

When the enterprise data is spread across multiple platforms, it is quite common to have multiple duplicates of the same data. Duplication not only clutters the systems, but also unnecessarily eats up into the resources. Getting rid of all the duplication potentially allows businesses to store their data using lesser infrastructure and consequently reducing the costs. Therefore, a powerful hybrid data management solution should be able to detect data duplication and allow enterprises to eliminate the duplicates easily.

2. Data Safety

Enterprises are increasingly migrating their mission-critical data to the cloud. The cloud’s agility, flexibility, scale-out options have rightly convinced the enterprises of its centrality to their responsiveness. This is especially true for handling all of the big data that businesses are collecting, storing, and analyzing today. Typically, taking backups of such data is an excruciatingly slow and long process. But, businesses need such data to be backed up and deployed rapidly. In fact, rapid backup, recovery, and deployment is one of the critical factors required of a hybrid data management solution.

3. Compliance Readiness

Enterprise data is today subject to a plethora of compliance requirements, depending on where, what, and how it is collected, stored, and analyzed. Businesses cannot afford to spend their precious time on ensuring compliance with HIPAA, EU’s upcoming GDPR, and other regulations. Hybrid data management solutions should facilitate regulatory compliances within their integrated environment. They should enable businesses to simply delete, transfer, migrate, or retain data at the click of a button to ensure regulatory compliance.

 4. Seamless Migration

An effective hybrid data management solution is one that virtually eliminates all the barriers separating the various data storage systems from one another. In other words, enterprises should be able to transfer data from one system to another seamlessly at blistering speeds to minimize downtime and maximize productivity.

5. Predictable Resiliency

Although system breakdowns, breaches, and faults can be minimized, they are not entirely avoidable. When such issues do arise, it is paramount that the mission-critical systems are restored to their full functionality in the shortest possible timeframes. But, issue resolution can be highly unpredictable, which means that in the time that it takes to resolve the issue, enterprises are losing revenue, loyal customers, and are left suffering immense damages to their reputation.

A good hybrid data management solution helps businesses minimize such damage by providing predictable resiliency in the event of such mishaps. In fact, such an iPaaS solution should offer predictability for workload migration, non-disruptive recovery testing, failback, failover, and other resiliency operations.

The Roadmap for Enterprises

Hybrid data management is a rapidly growing industry, but it is still in its nascent stage. This means that a number of vendors are calling their services ‘data management solutions’, while their offering lacks the most important capabilities characteristic of these solutions. Therefore, it is essential for enterprises to thoroughly analyze the various functionalities and features offered by such vendors before they choose a solution to meet their organization’s demands. For them, Veritas offers a comprehensive solution and robust option – its 360 Data Management Suite.

Veritas 360 Data Management Suite is a hybrid and cloud data management platform that offers powerful integrations with a plethora of cloud services and allows businesses to integrate their in-house systems into it, thereby offering a seamlessly integrated data management environment that is easy to use, secure, scalable, and feature-rich.

For more information about Veritas 360 Data Management Suite, visit here. Learn more about this cutting-edge data management platform and how it can help you streamline your enterprise digital transformation strategy by getting in touch with AsiaPac.

Tags:  Cloud, Data Management, Hybrid cloud, Multi cloud, Veritas, Veritas 360, 

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