Adopting Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Storage – a Guide
IDC expects most businesses to undertake a hybrid cloud storage journey as they seek to transform themselves into data - driven entities. IDC expects that hybrid cloud (and hybrid cloud storage) eventually will become the de facto model for businesses that want to maintain an on-premises infrastructure but, at the same time, heavily leverage an as a service model for additional infrastructure capacity. The extent to which they leverage cloud will vary. Larger enterprises tend to take a hybrid approach.
They leverage private clouds for tier 1 or mission critical data sets. For much of their tier 2/3 data sets, which can be sizable, they can benefit from a hybrid approach to storage that involves a solution like StorSimple. For SMEs and SMBs, a hybrid cloud approach involving a solution like StorSimple serves them well in cloud enabling their infrastructure without much change to how their applications are architected.
Using a combination of various hybrid cloud storage approaches, IT organizations can realize the combined benefits of on premises storage and public cloud storage. The larger the enterprise, the more acute its storage management complexity. Hybrid cloud approaches seek to reduce that complexity and therefore operational costs. It is important to note that:
There is and will be no one size fits all approach, and there are no approaches that are better than others. An approach or a collection of approaches should be aligned with the overall different data governance, service level, and budgetary requirements.
IT organizations should focus on an overall reduction in datacenter infrastructure capex spend, a proportional increase in opex spend, and an overall reduction in storage infrastructure spend.
In addition, IT organizations should ensure that their hybrid clouds storage approach addresses the following factors:
Virtualization density and how data is accessed by virtual machines in the datacenter: Hybrid cloud storage has to facilitate the connection and/or portability between the two locations so that the virtual instances can seamlessly coexist in both locations
Data growth and hybrid cloud: End users will assume that the data growth will be absorbed by the cloud provider and not in the on - premises datacenter. IT organizations have to educate their users on data locality.
Big Data and eDiscovery: IT needs to ensure that the necessary data is uploaded in to the cloud and can be easily accessed when necessary for adherence to governance, risk, and compliance policies
