According to a recent study by Cloudera, more than a third (68%) of IT experts in EMEA are developing hybrid cloud strategies, and almost three-quarters (72%) have multiple public cloud providers. This environment can be too complex without a good data architecture.
Organizations therefore need to define their strategy with complete transparency and visibility over what data they store, manage and process on a daily basis. What sensitive information should remain on-premiseWhat data and workloads would be beneficial to migrate to public cloud environments?
Without this knowledge, organizations can struggle to understand what they really need from a cloud service provider. In fact, the same study reveals that 92% of IT experts plan to migrate more data to the cloud in the next three years, so a deep understanding of their data becomes even more vital.
As explained by Juan Carlos Sánchez de la Fuente, Regional Vice President of Cloudera for Spain and Portugal, “From a corporate perspective, the cloud sits at the heart of IT strategy. But with so many options and such a complex environment, caution is key. You have to start by understanding exactly how the organization currently uses its data and what its plans are for the future.”
Cloud provider: 5 keys
In this context, the company identifies the main issues to consider when it comes to choosing the right cloud service provider:
- Flexibility to grow in the future. This is about whether the vendor will support the organization as it grows. For example, whether it has the facilities to adapt to current and future workloads; whether it will support open source standards; or its product roadmap. This can ensure that it is ready to support business-critical innovations such as AI or advanced analytics.
Understanding the company’s data management needs is key before choosing a cloud provider, considering points such as flexibility, costs or the integration of technologies.
- Costs relative to workloads. Cost will always be one of the most important factors for any cloud decision. Certain clouds run some workloads more cost-effectively and efficiently than others. Therefore, after first defining which workloads are going to the cloud, it is important to consider how these costs will affect the workloads that need to be run.
- Permanence policy. Although companies like AWS, Microsoft and Google have announced the apparent elimination of retention fees, there is still some lock-in to the cloud when deciding on a provider. So it makes sense to understand in advance what it would cost to move data off the cloud in the event of changing circumstances. This ‘portability’ is increasingly important for business agility.
- Service resilience and reliability. If a public cloud were to go down, entire businesses would grind to a halt. Now that organizations rely on the cloud, simply rebooting a server is no longer enough to restore services. That’s why reliability and resilience are two key criteria when choosing a provider. There may be a difference in cost, but if one offers greater resilience and suffers significantly less downtime, it may be a better choice considering that cloud outages can cost up to $100,000 per hour.
- Integration with other technologies. Organizations often use multiple tools for data analysis, storage, or information management. They may also use different clouds for different tasks. Organizations must therefore ensure that the cloud (or clouds) they choose integrates with all the technology tools they use across the enterprise.
