A Multi-Cloud World Presents Challenges, Opportunities for Big Data

A Multi-Cloud World Presents Challenges

Like it or not, multi-cloud is the new normal —whether it’s the result of a deliberate strategy or Shadow IT.

That means every business needs a plan to manage multiple clouds in a uniform way. It’s about more than just maintaining a view of resource utilization. Left unchecked, multi-cloud sprawl can devalue one of your most precious assets: your data.

Once you open the floodgates by allowing stakeholders to put data workloads on the cloud, that data becomes scattered across various platforms, due to the ease and familiarity of cloud provisioning. “Silos within data centers were bad enough,” says Rob Smoot, VP of product marketing at VMware. Now businesses have to contend with silos across different clouds. Certain data might be accessible by some applications, but not others, depending on where they’re hosted.

The risk of multi-cloud data fragmentation is especially problematic in today’s IT climate. First of all, it’s becoming an increasingly common challenge. With cloud security concerns subsiding, 80 percent of enterprises now plan to increase data management in the public cloud over the next year, according to a new study by Forrester Research, commissioned by Rackspace.

Meanwhile, big data is one of the fastest growing areas in cloud computing. Business stakeholders increasingly expect IT to harness big data to help them understand their customers’ preferences and buying habits. But when business intelligence applications, for example, can’t access all of the relevant data stores, there will be gaps in the intelligence that could lead stakeholders to make poor decisions.

The aforementioned Forrester study suggests that this issue is already a major blocker for big data initiatives: when asked to identify the top five barriers preventing them from moving data and analytics to an off-premises or public cloud platform, 65 percent of IT leaders chose “data integration becomes more complex in the public cloud” — behind only security and compliance challenges.

You need a big data strategy and supporting architecture to address the challenges of sprawling data — especially in this era of multi- and hybrid cloud environments. Data issues are prevalent regardless of the cloud platform (public or private), and big data solutions transcend all clouds (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Dedicated, OpenStack and VMware).

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