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Cloud Migration and Data Democratization Will Shine Spotlight on High Availability

By Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

While cloud computing will remain a core component of many organizations’ IT strategy, after realizing that relying merely on the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution, many companies will continue to seek a customized solution that fits their unique needs. Cloud computing and other technologies have enabled organizations to make services and data accessible to a more broader audience. However, as a result, the responsibility and the challenges that IT admins and managers face to achieve and maintain high availability for these systems will increase more than ever. 2023 will see many companies expand their usage of the cloud, combining with other robust technologies, such as end user computing, AI/ML, disaster recovery, and high availability solutions.

Cloud Migration and Repatriation will Continue and Bring New Demand

Many companies fast tracked their cloud adoption journey due to world-changing events in the last 2+ years and traded on-prem data centers for the cloud.

This cloud migration will continue, and at the same time, many companies will realize that migration itself was not a one-size-fits-all solution nor a panacea for issues of ‘application’ availability.

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform all have SLAs (Service Level Agreement) for high availability for the infrastructure they provide. However, those SLAs do not cover application-level high availability. In addition, although they may offer some protection for stateless applications, stateful applications, such as SAP, HANA, SQL Server, and Oracle require additional protection, such as failover clustering to ensure high availability.

Without this protection, a cloud VM (virtual machine) could be up and running, therefore high availability SLA-compliant, but the organization may be unable to run its essential applications. There are many causes for application downtime that is not covered under cloud SLAs for a variety of reasons, including software incompatibility, misconfiguration, and human error.

As companies move more of these stateful, essential applications to the cloud, the need for cloud high availability is growing. Studies show that last year in the US, more than 80% of companies moved some public cloud workloads, apps, and data to local infrastructure, including private or hybrid cloud, and sometimes a classic on-site data center. This trend – cloud repatriation – will continue in the upcoming year as well as cloud migration.

While companies move an asset from the public cloud for several reasons, such as adopting a hybrid cloud solution, boosting data security, meeting a new regulatory obligation, or trying to lower IT costs, repatriated systems will leverage solutions that minimize churn and the need for multiple application availability vendors.

Data Democratization Drives Need for High Availability

Advancements in virtualization and continued adoption of cloud computing and cloud storage have enabled companies to make more data available to more users than ever before.

This ongoing process of enabling everybody in an organization, irrespective of their technical background or knowledge, to work with data, to access and analyze data, and, as a result, make data-informed business decisions and build customer experiences powered by data, is described as ‘data democratization’. This trend of data democratization has been growing for several years, giving non-specialists the ability to access and analyze more data from more sources – potentially enabling more informed decision-making and increased efficiency companywide.

Making data democratization a reality is one large investment; educating employees to improve their data literacy, managing changes, and implementing necessary tools are not simple tasks. Among these challenges, data accessibility and availability – to ensure that the right data is made available in the right format in the right systems at the right time – are critical. Availability of data is one of the largest bottlenecks in data democratization. Whether a product analytics tool to gather qualitative data, or a business intelligence tool to identify prospects, accurate data being made available to everyone, at any time, is the only way to derive value and justify the investment.

In the upcoming year, the ongoing trend of data democratization will continue – driving increased usage of data solutions, tools, and applications such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP HANA and creating a heightened requirement for high availability for these databases and their associated applications and data storage, whether in the cloud, hybrid cloud, or on premises environments. Since data availability is so critical, companies will need a solid plan for protecting their data as well. In 2023, more companies will invest in advanced clustering and disaster recovery solutions to protect their systems and data from downtime and disasters.

Conclusion

The coming year will be a period of review and reassessment of corporate cloud strategies and the high availability protection needed to support those strategies. It will be important for companies to implement consistent high availability protection using the same failover clustering technology across all of their essential application environments – on premises or in the cloud. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology 

Cassius Rhue leads the Customer Experience team at SIOS Technology responsible for customer success spanning pre-sales, post-sales and professional services engagements. With more than 22 years of experience at SIOS and a keen focus on the customer, Cassius’ significant skills, and deep knowledge in software engineering, development, design, and deployment specifically in the HA/DR space are instrumental in addressing customer issues and driving their success. Cassius is a frequent blogger and public speaker on high availability and disaster recovery.