What You Should Know Before Moving to a Multi-Cloud Environment
Actian Corporation
July 30, 2019
Most IT leaders will agree: the cloud is the right place to host and operate many of their applications and systems. What isn’t quite as clear for these leaders is “which cloud” they should use.
The answer is “There is no right answer.” Each company (and application) has its own unique set of technical and operating needs. They will drive the decision about whether it should run in one of the public cloud environments or a company’s private cloud or on a 3rd party’s cloud environment (e.g., hosted and consumed as Software as a Service (SaaS)). This is a decision that should be made on a case-by-case basis and informed by a clearly documented and enforced enterprise-cloud policy.
Most organizations will likely choose and operate a hybrid environment with capabilities stratified across multiple clouds. Sensitive data apps may be on a private cloud, customer-facing systems that require geographic scalability may be on public clouds and SaaS components will likely be on someone else’s cloud. In this configuration, your focus should be on how you manage and connect the data in these systems. You will likely have business processes and data-driven analytics that require data to be integrated from different systems for your company to operate effectively.
Establishing and maintaining data connections in a multi-cloud environment is often more complex than managing connections in a single-cloud environment. Although it may be difficult, there are 3 reasons why data integration across multiple clouds is essential:
- Avoiding latency in business processes.
- Enabling data aggregation for analytics.
- Replicating data to manage business continuity risk.
Cloud environments provide a tremendous amount of cost leverage and scalability potential but require more robust data-connectivity capabilities than your IT department’s likely experience in legacy environments. In multi-cloud setups, it is often necessary to shift your integration patterns from point-to-point integrations between applications to more of a centralized data integration hub architecture, leveraging a platform, such as Actian DataConnect, to broker the connections to all your systems.
In addition to making manageability easier, DataConnect can help you monitor the flow of data between different cloud environments – you’ll make more informed decisions about how to improve end-to-end system performance and how to reduce infrastructure operating costs. Most companies make their initial cloud-selection decisions based on functionality criteria; however, cost savings is often the driver for making the decision to migrate systems from one cloud to another. Since cloud infrastructure is charged on a consumption model, understanding how your cloud applications are being used can help you identify cost-savings opportunities quicker.
Whether you are designing your cloud strategy in preparation to begin migrating capabilities to the cloud or seeking to optimize your current cloud utilization – selecting the right set of tools to help you manage your data connections is an essential step for harvesting maximum value from your cloud investments. Actian is an expert in hybrid data management, with modern solutions to help you manage data throughout the lifecycle of your IT systems. To learn more about how Actian can help your company in your cloud journey, visit www.actian.com/dataconnect.
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