To the Cloud or in the Cloud: Visualize Enterprise Storage and Applications Agnostically
The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to remote work accelerated digital transformation in 2020 and continues to do so in 2021. Counter to that, Gartner estimates IT spend decreased by 8 percent in 2020. Expected to do more with less, organizations are looking for ways to simplify operations, optimize infrastructure and reduce costs. Whether it’s migrating to the cloud or being in the cloud, the cloud defines digital transformation.
Any move presents the opportunity for cleanup. When planning for the migration of data or applications, insights are key to making intelligent decisions. From a data and application perspective, it’s important to understand what data you have stored, what is the current cost, and whether you can optimize that data in place. Finally, the tricky question—does migration even make financial sense?
To understand data value, organizations use file analytics solutions for metadata, content classification, and relevance relative to item-level activity. This process enables them to determine what’s valuable and then store and protect it appropriately. The storage or applications on which that data resides offer additional opportunities for resource and cost optimization. Regardless of any cleanup exercise, cloud adoption is inevitable for certain data and applications.
That said, translating from on-prem to the public cloud is not straightforward. Public cloud vendor selection considerations should include:
- feature availability,
- resources alignment between on-premises and virtual equivalent instances,
- a clear understanding of costs.
Forbes identifies this holistic approach as a key part of any cloud migration plan.
Take those primary considerations—compute, memory, and disk—and now go a step further. With insight, understand allocation versus usage. Add uptime, location, and associated costs, and you can start making intelligent, data-driven decisions for your multicloud strategy. A multicloud approach has benefits both within an organization and beyond because it reduces the likelihood of vendor lock-in and leads to a breakdown of barriers between providers.
The APTARE IT Analytics solution lets organizations visualize enterprise data and applications agnostically—any storage, any cloud, any backup. It correlates and aggregates thousands of data points from these sources and allows the ingestion and mapping of additional third-party data, including public cloud pricing models. You can easily consume the data via flexible reporting and configurable dashboards, simplifying decision-making about what to put where.
To learn more, check out Rajeev Mankar’s cloud optimization blog about APTARE’s cloud capabilities as part of the digital transformation journey.
