Ensuring Data Access with a Distributed Cloud Architecture

To fast-track digital initiatives, drive new opportunities, and remain competitive, organizations are re-architecting their IT infrastructures to manage applications and data across distributed cloud environments. In fact, according to a recent ESG survey of IT decision-makers, 67% of those surveyed are under pressure to accelerate IT infrastructure provisioning/deployment to support their company’s developers and line-of-business teams, and 54% said that the complexity of their IT infrastructure is slowing down IT operations and digital initiatives.

Data Considerations

Before adopting a cloud strategy, organizations should consider both modern and legacy applications and the retention requirements for their growing data sets. Depending on operational and budgetary factors and data set sizes, a hybrid or multi-cloud approach may be the best long-term solution. As organizations leverage multiple cloud platforms and expand their physical locations, they need to secure and protect their data as it increases as well.

When analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of public, private, or hybrid cloud solutions, organizations should ask the following questions: How much data will need to be stored; what the retention requirements of the data are; how frequently and quickly the data will need to be accessed; and can our on-premises infrastructure and staff scale to meet these demands.

Choosing the Right Path

Ultimately, an organization needs to be able to manage, access, and protect its data, regardless of where the data is created or stored. Many organizations today are exploring cloud data management software that has the capability to manage on-premises data as well as data stored across multiple clouds. Cloud data management software can provide on-premises and multi-cloud data management benefits that deliver universal availability, capable of merging the on-premises infrastructure and cloud storage services into a single global namespace.

Increased data mobility between distributed IT environments invariably increases complexity and challenges such as data vulnerability, as each type of cloud infrastructure carries its own risks as well as benefits. Public cloud has opened the door to remote access but can carry security concerns and increased egress fees when it comes to accessing data.   The overarching cloud usage viability has proven to be economically limiting for organizations in such sectors as high-performance computing because of the creation, usage, and archiving of large data sets.

With the right distributed cloud data management software, it should not matter where the data will be stored, whether in a public cloud, on-premises, a hybrid set-up, or in multiple clouds, as all the files will appear in their native format.

Key Considerations

Data management advancements mean that organizations can reap the benefits of distributed cloud environments, including multiple cloud services, regardless of where the data resides. Optimizing IT infrastructure with a policy-based data management platform capable of coordinating any combination of on-premises and cloud storage allows organizations to embrace the freedoms of universal data availability with distributed cloud, creating new business opportunities. In addition, it allows IT teams to focus on critical tasks while more cost-effective collaborative possibilities and the efficient usage and monetization of their data.

As IT organizations are faced with an increase in cost, complexity, and risk, they need to determine which strategies to adopt to ensure secure, cost-effective data management between clouds and on-premises environments.

Deanna Hoover is Product Marketing Director at Spectra Logic.

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