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TECH TALK
preferred to keep more of the expense in the
private cloud, where they spend CapEx. This
will make 2020 an interesting year, where
we’ll see four main trends or challenges:
Strategic demarcation between
public and private cloud data storage
Companies will need to draw a strategic line
between how and when they use the public
and private cloud for data storage. This
decision will require careful evaluation of the
agility, flexibility, speed-to-market and cost
offered by each approach. It will be impacted
by the quantity of legacy data to be stored, as
well as what data companies want to ‘own’
and store locally, on premises. Not all data is
suitable for storage in public clouds.
We are speaking to senior executives
responsible for cloud strategy who are
telling us they have a plan to move to cloud
solutions in totality and shut down all their
data centres, though there isn’t necessarily
a timeline in place to support this goal as
yet. In parallel, while they have committed
some hosting to the cloud, there isn’t a set
strategy for what goes where in the long
term, which suggests there is still a lot of
fine-tuning to be done.
The trend to move towards cloud solutions
in totality is shared by Sharad Saggar,
Managing Director at Core DataCloud, who
says: “Market demand for a ‘cloud first’
strategy is gaining momentum.”
“
COMPANIES WILL
NEED TO DRAW A
STRATEGIC LINE
BETWEEN HOW
AND WHEN THEY
USE THE PUBLIC
AND PRIVATE
CLOUD FOR DATA
STORAGE.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Eran Brown, EMEA CTO, Infinidat
In line with this, the company, a UK-based
Cloud Service Provider, has already revised its
enterprise storage system to support growing
customer demand for its cloud-based disaster
recovery and backup services business.
Increased focus on the economics
of data storage
As data growth continues unabated, larger
organisations will be under increased
pressure to understand more clearly the ‘cost
versus benefit’ for different storage models
as the volume of data created, shared and
stored expands exponentially.
Companies will need to re-evaluate their
private cloud solutions if they want to offer
an alternative to public cloud storage that
is not cost-prohibitive. In this new standard
where we convert time to money, private
clouds are cheaper but yet often they lose
business to the public cloud for agility (time).
Any business wanting to improve its IT
spending will need to improve the private
cloud’s agility.
This is not to say that private cloud needs
to be as agile as the public cloud, only agile
enough so that it no longer makes sense to
pay the public cloud premium. For example,
if the public cloud takes 15 minutes to bring
up a new environment and the private cloud
takes a month, BUs will go to the public
cloud. But if the difference becomes 15
minutes versus one day, it’s a completely
different discussion.
Private clouds have a cost advantage, but
they have to step up their agility to be a
true alternative to public ones. Without this
change in agility, the BUs will keep spending
more money to gain agility. If this happens,
it will be hard to define a clear strategy on
what should stay on premise, as often the
time-to-market consideration will overrule
this strategic decision.
Growing interest in multi-
cloud solutions
Data gravity issues and digitilisation may
result in increased interest in multi-cloud
solutions that are better able to compete on
price, availability and resiliency. Flexibility
and accessibility may have been the key
drivers behind initial decisions about cloud
storage, but in hindsight it has not always
proved to be the most cost-effective solution.
Hybrid cloud models will continue to provide
the most commercially resilient solution,
especially for those companies that want
to take a ‘cloud-first’ approach. A subset of
defining a cloud strategy is also to consider
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