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
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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.
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