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.
All this unstructured data presents large
storage and security challenges. At first, when cloud storage rose to
prominence, organizations thought the answer was to move the vast majority of
their data—both structured and unstructured—to the cloud.
However, these same organizations soon
figured out that the cloud is not only more expensive than they thought, it is
also hard to access in a timely fashion when they need specific data, due to
the cloud’s inherent latency.
That’s why we’re now seeing the cloud
repatriation trend, in which more and more organizations are moving to a hybrid
infrastructure that involves keeping some data and applications in the cloud
while returning other data and applications to an on-premises infrastructure.
The reality is that data volumes in the
cloud have become quite unmanageable. This means that it can be more beneficial
in terms of cost, security, and performance to move at least some of your
company’s data back on-premises.
But as companies bring their data back
on-prem, this raises the question of where and how to store it all.
With the emergence of cloud repatriation,
organizations need a data storage solution that can protect business data
wherever it lives—on-premises, offsite or in the cloud—and to ensure that this
data is always available, no matter what happens.
Any storage solution also needs to be highly
scalable to keep pace with an organization’s data growth, which is often more
than 100 percent per year. The right storage solution will allow organizations
to cost-effectively add any number of drives, anytime and in any granularity to
meet their expanding storage requirements with no configuration and no
application downtime.
Lastly, an ideal storage system will offer analytics to help organizations quickly figure out which pieces of information are critical to their business and which are not. With this ability, organizations can make better decisions about which data sets can be pushed to the cloud, which can be stored locally and which need to be repatriated. Analytics can also help identify the data that should be backed up and the data that need not be, giving organizations an intelligent, tiered data architecture that provides rapid access to mission-critical information.
The proliferation of data is reaching
epic proportions, just when companies are discovering that they can’t simply
upload it all into the cloud. What they need is a new approach to storage
infrastructure that can manage their data growth and, at the same time, secure
all of their unstructured data, wherever they put it.
Choosing the right storage system for the
new reality of cloud repatriation gives organizations peace of mind. It assures
them that they can cost-effectively manage their increasing data volumes and
gives them the confidence that their data is always securely at their
fingertips.
The good news is that storage technology is up to the challenge. It can be your secret weapon to getting better control of all your data and mitigating risk once and for all.
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