The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that more than 80% of IT organisations will be committed to hybrid cloud architectures by the end of this year, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in organisations.
In addition, its analysts predict that by 2018, at least half of IT spending will be cloud based, reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure, and 60% to 70% of all software, services, and technology spending by 2020.
While companies born in the “cloud era”, such as Airbnb, Amazon, and Snapchat, have utilised public cloud since inception (and shown the scale and business successes is offers), blue-chip companies are no different, with many reducing their data centre footprints by moving into the cloud – and ensuring that they do not become obsolete in this new computing landscape.
“The digitisation of business requires enterprises to move faster and be more agile to survive. Applying new technologies to existing business activities (how do we leverage AI to increase customer satisfaction?) fuels the cloud paradigm. For many enterprises, public cloud represents the ability to rapidly access resources for innovation while operating in a data-rich environment,” notes Rubrik’s Guide to Public Cloud, a technical white paper by the cloud management company.
The paper highlights that enterprise IT looking to increase cloud usage will find that marrying non-cloud systems with cloud-native applications and infrastructure poses new principles. These, it states are:
* Shift from asset to service consumption: Traditional IT is largely based on providing finite assets that service relatively stable workloads and predictable business growth. In a cloud model, IT rapidly provisions services accordingly to business demand.
* Automate service delivery: With cloud, near-zero time to market can be delivered through automation frameworks. Infrastructure becomes programmable through code by being structured into templates that can be easily versioned and replicated for future deployments.
* Develop applications based on microservices: Rapid shifts in business demand require applications to deliver newer capabilities faster, to be resilient to failures, and to scale-out on-demand. Applications built in this new manner can be decomposed into independent components called “microservices”, each delivering a single function.
“The public cloud is playing an ever more prominent role in an organisation’s holistic IT strategy, and we are witnessing its adoption across the African continent,” says Anton Jacobsz, MD of Networks Unlimited, an official distributor of Rubrik’s cloud management platform throughout Africa.
With this growth comes the urgent need for a cloud-scale data management platform that not only protects but also manages the data.
As public cloud plays a greater role in overall enterprise IT strategy, the need for a cloud-scale data management platform becomes paramount to protect and manage data produced in both the cloud and elsewhere.
Rubrik’s white paper points out: “As enterprises migrate applications to the cloud, IT is depended on to deliver core data protection (backup, disaster recovery, archival) to maintain instant data accessibility through disasters, data loss and service outages.”
The Rubrik Cloud Data Management platform provides a cloud-native approach to managing the lifecycle of data, from creation to expiration, to drive better performance and operational continuity at lower costs. Rubrik bridges the gap between owned, on-premises infrastructure and the cloud by decoupling data from the data centre through a software-defined fabric. Comprehensive data management is delivered through instant access, automated orchestration, and enterprise-class data protection and resiliency.
In summary, Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform provides:
* Instant access, that is, it enables predictive global search and delivers instant application recovery by unifying data locked within disparate application silos into one globally indexed namespace while leveraging zero-byte cloning technology to enable on-demand copy data workflows.
* Automated orchestration by dramatically reducing daily operational management, providing a step-function change in simplicity by enabling a single policy engine to orchestrate service level agreements (SLAs) across the entire data lifecycle. In essence, the Rubrik programmatic interface automates how data services are created, consumed, and retired across clouds.
* Security and compliance, Rubrik secures data whether in-flight or at-rest throughout its lifecycle, regardless of location – the platform delivers granular role-based access control across all cloud data management workflows while providing automated compliance reporting to successfully complete various industry and internal audits.
“Delivering data protection and management for cloud requires a modern approach to accommodate the shift to service consumption, automation of service delivery, and development of modular, scale-out applications,” continues the white paper.
Jacobsz stresses the ease of deployment of Rubrik’s platform, which makes it so valuable in enabling new or complex business models in the regions. “Organisations can either deploy the platform on premises through plug-and-play appliances and software appliances, or on certified hardware platforms.”
The white paper elaborates: “To protect cloud-native applications, Rubrik can be deployed as a software instance in a public cloud provider to orchestrate all critical data management functions – backup and recovery, replication and disaster recovery, archival, search, and more. Users spin up the recommended compute instance on supported public cloud providers and can scale-out easily by growing the Rubrik cloud cluster in lock-step with cloud data growth. All data is indexed and efficiently stored in a single, scale-out repository while providing data resiliency. Rubrik provides the same consumer-grade HTML5 interface to manage the cloud as used to manage data on premises and at the edge. Users can instantly locate (with real-time predictive search) and deliver application consistent recoveries for data born in the cloud, including files, folders, file sets, VMs, and database instances (such as Windows, Linux, SQL databases). Users receive actionable insights with Rubrik Envision’s rich visual reporting, which allows creation, customisation, and sharing of platform analytics on consumption, compliance, and more, across a multi-cloud environment.
“By using Rubrik, enterprises free data from underlying infrastructure for ultimate workload portability. Cloud vendor lock-in can be avoided by migrating data from public cloud to public cloud to optimise application service quality.”
Of note is that Rubrik supports environmental considerations too as it converges backup software, replication, catalog databases, deduplicated storage, and more into a single software fabric. It does not retain the complex, bloated architecture reminiscent of legacy data protection solutions.
“Battle-tested by the Fortune 500 companies, we have witnessed Rubrik address the four main ‘pain points’ of our customers: management complexity, lengthy recover processes, lack of scalability and cost. We are most pleased to have Rubrik’s solutions to these challenges available in our region and contributing to trading hardware management for the unbelievable strength of the public cloud,” concludes Jacobsz.