Enterprises to spend 56% more of their IT budgets on cloud technologies by 2019.
The cloud momentum
As I meet with customers, most of whom are large global enterprises, the topic of the cloud continues to come up. Getting cloud right means new ways to stay competitive and stand out in their respective markets. For example, moving test/dev operations to the cloud has allowed many organizations to reap the benefits of increased productivity, rapid product delivery and accelerated innovation. Or another benefit the cloud provides is an on demand infrastructure which can be used as a landing zone for business operations in the event of a disaster.
No longer do IT staff have to spend countless hours installing a set of SQL, DB2 or Oracle servers to run your in-house databases, CRM or analytics platform. Databases are offered as services that are ready for the largest, most intense data warehouse needs, and the ability to add analytics capabilities on top gives organizations more opportunities to gain more insights from your data. Additionally, companies have choice. Subscribing to multiple services from multiple cloud vendors simultaneously to test products or services in real time, only paying for what resources are used or consumed, is hugely beneficial.
It’s this increased agility companies are after, and what allows them to grow faster and better meet the needs of their customer.
Persisting concerns
But of course, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty when it comes to cloud, which causes concern. Some of the most common concerns I hear about are related to data protection and service interruptions. There’s a fear of accidentally deleting critical data, being held hostage to ransomware, and the risk of application or resource failure. There’s also a general misunderstanding regarding how much of the responsibility for addressing these concerns sits with customers versus cloud providers.
In a traditional sense, the perception that because servers and data were ‘tucked away’ safe and sound within the confines of the on-premises data center, those concerns were more easily addressed. But, in the cloud, that’s not the case. When the data center moves to the cloud, rows and rows of 42U racks filled with blades and towers transform into on-demand cloud instances that can be spun up or down at will. This causes a sense of ‘losing control’ for many.
Some argue that the risks actually increase when you move to the cloud and no longer own the resources, but we believe those risks can be minimized, without sacrificing the rewards.
The trick here is to keep things simple, especially for IT teams that are responsible for protecting company data – wherever that data is stored. And that’s an important point, because it’s not an either/or conversation. According to RightScale’s 2018 State of the Cloud survey, 51% of enterprises operate with a hybrid strategy and 81% are multi-cloud. This information further provides support for clouds existing alongside an existing on-premises data center strategy for most large enterprise customers. More point solutions, creating silos is a losing strategy. Equally so are platform specific technologies that are inflexible and do not account for the persisting heterogeneous, hybrid nature of enterprise IT environments.
Veritas has you covered
In the midst of this cloud evolution, Veritas has taken its years of data management expertise and leadership, and developed a data protection technology called Veritas CloudPoint, that is cloud-native, light-weight and flexible, yet robust with core enterprise-grade data protection capabilities that can be extended to protect workloads in public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Veritas CloudPoint can easily be introduced to your AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or data center environments. Utilizing the available cloud infrastructure APIs, CloudPoint delivers an automated and unified snapshot-based data protection experience with a simple, intuitive, and modern UI. Figure 1 below shows the basics of how it works.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg…
With the recent Microsoft and Google press releases announcing version 2.0 of Veritas CloudPoint, we have expanded the reach of CloudPoint to VMware environments as well as support for high-performance, on-premises databases such as MongoDB.
We are already working on our next release of CloudPoint, targeted for availability in the coming quarters, where we plan to add cloud support for VMware Cloud on AWS and IBM. For private cloud environments, we plan to offer VM-level and application-level support for Microsoft’s private cloud platform Azure Stack. We already announced in-guest support for Azure Stack with Veritas NetBackup earlier this year. [1]
And, in staying consistent with my comment above regarding point solutions and platform specific solutions being a losing strategy, we plan to integrate CloudPoint with the next release of Veritas NetBackup, see figure 2 below. This should be welcome news for NetBackup customers in particular, as they will have an integrated way to address data protection requirements in the most optimized way possible, without adding more silos, and no matter where their workloads run. But, I’ll save the details and specifics on that for my next blog!
Be on the lookout for more news in the coming months.
[1] Forward-looking Statement: Any forward-looking indication of plans for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change at the sole discretion of Veritas. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality, or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Veritas, may or may not be implemented, should not be considered firm commitments by Veritas, should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions, and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information is provided without warranty of any kind, express or implied.
