How to Protect and Manage Data in the Hybrid Cloud
Research firm Ovum has predicted that 75 percent of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy by 2016. That estimate may be low. A study by The Bunker found that 90 percent of enterprises in the UK are already using the hybrid cloud, and 96 percent plan to move some business applications and data to a cloud platform within the next five years.
The hybrid cloud is popular because it gives organizations the “best of both worlds,” enabling them to tap the cost and scalability advantages of the public cloud where appropriate while retaining mission-critical applications and data within the controlled, private cloud environment. According to The Bunker survey, 60 percent of organizations have moved to the hybrid cloud in order to gain greater flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency.
The survey also found that many hybrid cloud initiatives were stalled or failed to deliver measurable ROI. In many cases, the failures were due to a lack of in-house expertise, but there were also technical challenges related to the integration of cloud and non-cloud resources. Storage can be particularly problematic — while cloud workloads are machine and location independent, data housed on permanent storage is far from mobile. Despite its benefits, the hybrid cloud creates storage integration challenges that can trap critical data in silos.
The inability to move data across multiple clouds limits organizations’ ability to capitalize on the hybrid cloud model. According to an IDG Research survey, 78 percent of enterprises rate the ability to move data across multiple clouds as critical or very important but only 29 percent of those organizations rated their ability to do so as excellent or good.
EMC is addressing this problem by extending cloud capabilities across its entire storage and data protection portfolio, with simple, automated cloud tiering to and from a number of storage platforms. EMC has also enhanced its FAST.X tiering solution, which automatically tiers data to public clouds from both EMC and non-EMC storage, and is offering expanded support for public and private cloud providers.
EMC’s cloud tiering capabilities for data protection enable customers to store hot and warm data locally for immediate access and cold data in the public cloud for more cost-efficient long-term retention. The new NetWorker 9 includes a universal policy engine that automates and simplifies data protection regardless of where the data resides.
CloudPools, a new feature for EMC Isilon, supports big data applications by seamlessly tiering cold data to public and private clouds. The tiering happens without the need for a cloud gateway, making it easy, flexible and cost-effective.
CloudBoost seamlessly extends customers’ existing EMC data protection solutions, including the Data Protection Suite and Data Domain, to elastic, resilient, scale-out cloud storage. CloudBoost 2.0 features enhanced overall performance, scalability and manageability, with 3x faster throughput and 15x more data capacity than previous versions. In addition, CloudBoost enables de-duplication and incremental restores without the need for complex cloud compute infrastructure.
Technologent has leading expertise in EMC storage and data protection technologies, as well as experience in public, private and hybrid cloud platforms. Let us show you how EMC’s solutions can help maximize the value of the hybrid cloud.