Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 16 | Page 25

COMMENT THERE REMAINS AN ASSUMPTION THAT DATA MUST BE KEPT ON-PREMISE DUE TO PERCEIVED SECURITY ISSUES BUT, AS ATTITUDES CHANGE, ENTERPRISES MUST LOOK TO GO BEYOND SIMPLE APPLICATION TESTING IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD ENVIRONMENT It is therefore critical that availability is put at the forefront of any digital transformation or hybrid cloud strategy. This will ensure that when applications and workloads are being moved across various infrastructures there’s a backup and disaster recovery plan in place to guarantee that downtime is not an issue. However, our research finds that the majority off businesses are struggling to achieve this. The Veeam 2016 Availability Report found that, despite investing in their data centres, 82% of businesses admit suffering an availability gap between how fast they can recover applications and how fast they need applications to be recovered. They www.intelligentcio.com are therefore unable to meet end- users’ requirements for an always-on business. The growth in data is already high but it’s going to reach exponential levels that will put even greater strain on legacy IT systems. This means that the need for hybrid cloud approach is more important than ever to deliver on customers’ increasingly demanding expectations. Time to put hybrid into action While there’s plenty of talk about the hybrid opportunity, there still aren’t enough enterprises tapping into the lower cost and flexibility benefits of the public cloud. There remains an assumption that data must be kept on-premise due to perceived security issues but, as attitudes change, enterprises must look to go beyond simple application testing in the public cloud environment. Hybrid cloud needs to be used in a way that benefits the individual organisation, and its workloads. For example, it’s particularly beneficial to a university as it can choose to move some workloads to the public cloud at particularly busy times during the year, such as A-Level results day and clearing when they have to deal with a vast influx of data that its on-premise setup may not be able to handle. It is no longer acceptable for downtime to affect any service and, while the next few years will bring plenty of uncertainties, it’s guaranteed that the importance of data availability — anywhere, anytime — will only increase. Enterprises must have a clear cloud strategy in place before they fully invest in cloud infrastructure. At the core of this is ensuring data and information is available at all times. INTELLIGENTCIO 25