By Huzefa Motiwala, Director, Systems Engineering, India (SAARC), Commvault India
Cloud computing has been around for a while, and its adoption is steadily increasing among enterprises. As businesses look for greater agility, flexibility and cost efficiency in their operations, cloud will continue to dominate. With increasing pressure from different business functions to do more with less, IT managers are looking for solutions that are extensible, simple, and fast and can scale up easily as the organization grows.
Cloud enables efficiency in data management by offering multiple benefits such as scalable storage for files, applications and other types of data. It improves collaboration among team members regardless of their locations and saves time and money by eliminating the need to build a costly data center and hire an IT team to manage it. Therefore, most organizations are trying to harness the power of cloud to efficiently protect, manage and backup their data.
However, there are a number of concerns that companies face in opting for cloud-based infrastructure. The biggest risk involved is “Time to Market” which directly impacts the company’s bottom-line. In the Indian context, we have additional challenges related to connectivity and cost of bandwidth coupled with concerns about data security and data governance.
How can one face these challenges and why do experts still recommend cloud? Let’s try to understand with a few use cases.
Backup & Archiving
While many vendors offer on-premise backup services, cloud-based backup can be easily achieved with the help of solutions such as AWS or Azure.
Disaster Recovery or DRaaS
DR, as a service, usually starts with development/testing in the cloud and matures into DR as companies begin to see how easy it is to replicate their workloads and machines, and move data onto the cloud. Continuous replication of critical data, apps and infrastructure to the cloud makes it easier to recover data in case of any disruption.
Cloud Migration and Data Portability
Cloud enables data portability and creates more flexibility and choice for an organization. Whether you need an On-Premise, Hybrid or Public Cloud solution or you want to choose between any of the key vendors – AWS, Azure, VMware, hyper-V and Nutanix Acropolis, by migrating your IT infrastructure and data to the cloud, you can switch providers and shift to a new infrastructure, whether for redundancy or cost reasons.
Development & Testing
If you are planning to start delivering some of your own services in the cloud, it makes sense to drive Testing and Development through cloud. This will help you achieve the above mentioned benefits and deliver services in a more cost effective way. You can use metrics reporting to understand how many resources are being used and how you can optimize them.
Data Solutions for SaaS offerings
Before making your final choice, you may need to ask yourself a few important questions. SaaS may provide data protection to some extent but will their SLA work for you? Would you be able to do other things with that data? What if you want to use that data for something else? Will it be possible for you to own a copy of your own data? You should look for solutions that allow API access to third parties and have the capabilities for leveraging all Data Management capabilities, including Data Protection and Data Indexing to extract maximum value from your investment.