Rapid digital transformation challenges your data in a hybrid cloud environment
It’s often during the most challenging times that we see the fastest innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. Consider the speed at which vaccines have been developed, for example. Or how businesses have adopted entirely digital ways of interacting with customers, consumers, and their employees – creating new models in the process.
The changes have affected every area of our lives. In just over a year, where possible, businesses have moved their workforce to work from home, schools, colleges, and universities adopted remote learning, telehealth has become the norm, and online retail has recorded record sales. The pandemic and enforced lockdowns globally have escalated the adoption of digital transformation worldwide. How long might that shift have taken otherwise? Another couple of years?
Out of necessity, businesses now realise that they can adapt and enhance technology quickly. They also realise that they most likely need to combine their in-house resources (their own data centre) and external resources (public clouds).
This is a recognition of the practical reality of doing business, but there’s a more aspirational recognition too. Organisations can see that this newfound agility can be a key point of difference in competitive markets. Assisting in how quickly they can move into a market, providing a complete offer, increasing speed and agility. As such, a hybrid cloud environment can be critical to success.
So, what are the key areas that an enterprise needs to consider to obtain the best out of a multi or hybrid cloud environment? When it comes to moving and managing data, it can help to look at the following four stages:
- Planning
Mapping out where your data should be is a key step. Which workloads are best to keep in your data centre, and which are best in the public cloud? For the latter, you’ll also need to be able to project what level of performance you will get from different public cloud platforms– and ideally, you would want to model the true cost of operating on these different platforms.
- Migrating
Once you’ve considered the above, you’ll also need to establish how to migrate services. Can you predict and control the time, resources, costs and risks, of the change? Do you have the skills in-house or do you need outside expertise? Is it possible to speed up the process with automation? What if you need to do a full rollback or mid-way through the processes? Could you do this and recover your data?
- Protecting
This is about how you protect your data in the most cost-effective way. In other words, what’s the most efficient way to back up data across different clouds? For example, can you avoid multiple backups that you don’t need?
- Optimising
Enterprises are storing huge quantities of data – but how many can articulate the value of the data they are storing. Indeed, half of the stored data is dark. This means many organisations are paying to store redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data. It’s therefore important to be able to keep an ongoing inventory of your data and ensure where possible you’re removing ROT data, therefore optimising storage costs.
Given the acceleration in digital transformation and the growing importance of the cloud, how you manage your data is clearly key to being an efficient and agile organisation. Creating or evolving your strategy can be tricky but at Veritas, we work with our customers to define what they need to achieve first and foremost. Then, we apply our technical knowledge to make it happen.
If you’d like to discuss how to best manage data in a multi-cloud environment, get in touch.
