Be it our music library, photo albums or ‘hilarious’ cat videos, a lot has changed in how we manage our personal data over the past decade. Storing – and protecting – picture albums used to be an arduous task of transferring photos from a camera to computer before burning them onto CDs or external hard disks, and then buying more storage and repeating the process as space ran out.
Thankfully, today we don’t have to deal with the complex, painstaking process of years past; we snap a few photos on our phone and…voila…they’re automatically backed up and managed in the cloud. Any photo is easily and instantly accessible from any device, anywhere in the world. The cloud represents a new era liberating consumers and enterprises alike by delivering universal access and automation over their applications.
[easy-tweet tweet=”The cloud represents a new era liberating consumers and enterprises alike” hashtags=”Cloud, Enterprises”]
Unfortunately, most businesses are slow to fully embrace the cloud world and still have to deal with the complexity of managing data that we, as consumers, have long forgotten. And if we thought we had it bad, managing business data is infinitely more complicated than a few photo albums. Businesses have databases that are constantly changing and teams need to access both current and past versions of their data – all whilst following stringent requirements around data security. And make no mistake, businesses are creating data at extreme rates. So much so that IDC predicts that worldwide data levels will reach a staggering 180 Zetabytes by 2025. Little wonder that enterprise data storage requirements are growing at 40% per year, according to Enterprise Strategy Group.
Coming hand-in-hand with this exponential data boom is a new breed of hybrid cloud enterprises all looking to take advantage of the emerging cloud economy and promising to deliver greater agility, speed and performance without the added cost and complexity.
However, many enterprises are unable to realise the promise of the cloud because of the limitations within their own infrastructure. They have spent millions on data centres, and now want to leverage the pay-as-you-use economics and automation of the cloud while maintaining control and visibility over their data. What they are missing is a killer application that bridges the gap between their owned systems and the cloud. All the while data collection and analysis have become crucial for reaching business goals across industries and, as the role of data has transformed, so has the way in which it is stored, protected, and managed.
So herein lies the challenge: how do enterprises democratise the public cloud whilst simultaneously managing data at scale across hybrid cloud architectures?
Welcome to Cloud Data Management.
“But what is cloud data management?” I hear you shout. To fully understand the solution we first need to remember the problem.
Backup and recovery, until very recently, was an extremely stilted market. It served as an insurance policy rather than a usable business asset. From a CIO’s perspective, backup and recovery were in the hopes that they would never need to use it. Think about it — enterprises would only see the return on their investment in the case of a disaster.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Cloud data management is about securely managing and orchestrating data to wherever it is needed” hashtags=”Cloud, Data”]
Cloud data management, however, redefines the backup and recovery market into a value-creating function. Cloud data management is about securely managing and orchestrating data to wherever it is needed, whenever. Imagine having all your data as easily available to an analytics application in the cloud, as it is to your local test/dev. team. This opens up a world of possibilities for CIOs to use their data to create value without the limitations of infrastructure.
In a nutshell, cloud data management orchestrates mission critical application data across private and public clouds while delivering data management functions such as backup, disaster recovery, archival, compliance, search, analytics, and copy data management in a single, run anywhere platform. Built for ‘Generation Cloud’, it eliminates the complexity of legacy solutions with an automated policy engine that manages data throughout its lifecycle across all data management functions.
This means abandoning the legacy architecture approaches that only bring incremental improvements to the table, and instead creating a new, ground-up solution that encompasses a scale-out design and convergence between software and hardware, allowing active data management capability and live online access to historical data.
Ultimately, it helps businesses realise cloud economics. Unless they leverage an application that spans their data centre and the cloud while ensuring universal access, declarative automation, and security, it will always be a slow adoption path to the cloud.
Cloud data management is here to empower businesses to run faster, smarter, and stronger.