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Success in the multi-cloud hinges on control over your data

ToddHauschildt
Not applicable
Employee

Like many CIOs, I too am constantly engaged in the balancing act of keeping the lights on, and advancing the business through the use of technology.  Adopting various cloud infrastructure services is a key component in this balancing act. balance.png

However, despite what IDC has said regarding the “85% of enterprise IT organizations who will commit to multi-cloud architectures by 2018,”[1] if not careful, a multi-cloud environment can quickly become a multi-siloed one (if not already), which any CIO will tell you is bad for business.

So, what’s the key?  How do you ensure success in the multi-cloud world?

For starters, focus on the one thing that is and always has been common through every form of disparate technology IT has ever employed – from legacy boxes in the data center to virtualized, software-defined, converged, containerized, and cloud infrastructure – the common thread through all of this is YOUR DATA.

Without control over your data, multi-cloud success is all but impossible.  And by the way, I’m not speaking in philosophical terms here.  If you aren’t already improving data control – and by this, I mean knowing what you have, where it exists, who has access to it, moving it around to where it needs to go, and ensuring it’s protected everywhere no matter what – your ability to regain control will diminish over time. 

Consider how fast data is growing and how much more reliant on it we’re becoming.  Yet, more than half of the data in a typical enterprise is still categorized as “dark.”[2] –hugely inefficient from a cost perspective and even more troublesome from a data risk perspective, especially given the current regulatory environment.

As customer number one for Veritas Multi-Cloud Data Management technologies, I often have the opportunity to work directly with our engineering and development teams in helping them better understand the challenges IT faces, and provide feedback on how well a given technology meets our own needs.  A few of these technologies have hit the market today, which should be welcome news to any CIO playing the same balancing act that I face each day.

One in particular that has been top of mind for me is the Information Map.  Companies across the board are in the midst of preparing for the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which goes live in May of 2018.  Veritas is no different in this regard.  Fortunately, we are also an Information Governance company, so as part of being customer number one, we had already installed a pre-production version of the Information Map in our environment and have seen its considerable value, as it has enabled us to identify dark data, and further get us on the path to GDPR compliance.  I am excited about the release, and are planning full production as part of the GDPR suite of applications.

Have a look at the announcement made via press release this morning, which discusses new advancements in the areas of data visibility, workload migration, and snapshot-based data protection and management – all with the multi-cloud environments in mind.

Additionally, a few of my peers at Veritas, Lynn Lucas our CMO and Mike Palmer our CPO, have teamed up with IDC analyst Rick Villars and General Manager of Azure Storage Tad Brockway, for a digital event discussing successful multi-cloud strategies and why the focus on data is so key.  Register here to view that event.

Would love to hear your thoughts, please feel free to comment below.

Todd

 

[1] IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2017 Predictions

[2] Veritas Data Genomics Report 2016