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VMblog Expert Interview: Cloudian Talks Storage, On-Premises, Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud

 

Do you know where your data is located?  This may sound like a no-brainer question, but these days, enterprise organizations often store their data in multiple locations.  And with petabytes of data, that can include private consumer information -- the answer as to where and how data is stored, is not always readily available.

Do you find yourself participating in the "on premises" vs. cloud vs. hybrid cloud discussion, and yet, you still don't have a clear understanding or decision made?  You aren't alone.

To get a better understanding of all of this, VMblog sat down with industry expert, Jon Toor, Chief Marketing Officer at Cloudian.  

VMblog:  What are the respective benefits of storing data in the public cloud and on-premise? 

Jon Toor:  Public cloud and on-premises deployments each have unique advantages that meet different business needs. Workloads deployed on-premises will deliver better performance with local storage because the data is located closer to the compute resources, thus reducing latency.  Furthermore, local storage saves cost by reducing the need for costly high-speed WAN bandwidth. Finally, when data is on-prem, organizations have complete control over how that data is accessed and secured.

Public cloud deployments provide value in several scenarios. First, when data is employed by cloud-native applications, it makes sense to host that data in the cloud environment. Second, cloud fills the bill when an off-premises storage environment is required, such as for a disaster recovery plan. Here, public cloud "cold storage" options can provide a cost-effective DR copy. Third, public cloud offloads management, proving added capacity with minimal additional overhead.   

VMblog:  What data should stay on premises vs. being sent to the public cloud?

Toor:  Capacity-intensive workloads - ones that are likely to grow to multiple petabytes -- are often better on-premises. These include workloads used in healthcare, scientific research, surveillance, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and media and entertainment. Performance is often critical to these workloads, making on-prem a good choice. Furthermore, at this scale an on-prem solution will be less costly, often saving 70% vs public cloud. 

Highly sensitive data can also benefit from an on-prem environment. Security policies can be consistently applied, reducing the risk that a misguided administrator could put information at risk.  

VMblog:  Is hybrid cloud really becoming the predominant model?  If so, what's driving this?

Toor:  Hybrid cloud is gaining ground, bolstered by high-profile hybrid announcements such as AWS Outposts, Google Cloud Anthos, and Microsoft Azure Stack.  A hybrid model gives the best of both worlds, combining the flexible scalability of the public cloud and the performance and cost benefits of on-premises. For example, in a data protection use case, hybrid users can benefit from the fast recovery time from an on-prem data copy and get the protection of an off-site copy, all within a single workflow. In an analytics use case, a complete copy can be maintained on-prem, while specific data elements can be migrated to the cloud for analysis. 
VMblog:  Is on-prem storage inherently more secure than public cloud storage? 

Toor:  On-premises storage is not necessarily more secure than public cloud storage as security is determined by a range of factors, including products, policies and the basic skills of an organization's security staff. However, on-premises storage does simplify the consistent application of security policies across all data. This may reduce the risk of data breaches due to careless mistakes such as misconfiguring a data bucket.

VMblog:  When it comes to the public cloud component of a hybrid cloud strategy, is there any reason to look beyond Amazon, Google and Microsoft?

Toor:  Yes, there are other public cloud providers beyond the "Big 3" that offer the advantages of greater specialization, multi-source flexibility and geographic diversity. These other providers are increasingly adopting S3-based object storage, which enables them to deliver many of the same benefits as AWS, GCP and Azure. As an example, VMware recently began offering their VMware Cloud Provider Partners the ability to deliver new value-add services based on a fully native S3-compatible object storage platform.

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About Jon Toor

Jon Toor leads Cloudian’s inbound and outbound marketing teams. Prior to Cloudian, Toor served as vice president of digital marketing and demand generation at Brocade. He also served as the vice president of marketing at Xsigo Systems where he led the outbound marketing team, a group he led from company launch until the company acquisition by Oracle. Prior to Xsigo, he served at ONStor as vice president of marketing. Toor holds an MBA, bachelor of science in mechanical engineering, and a bachelor of arts in economics all from Stanford University.

Published Monday, December 09, 2019 7:32 AM by David Marshall
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