If something feels spooky to you right now, it might not be ghosts, jack-o-lanterns or the Georgia Bulldogs” defense – it might just be your company”s data migration to the cloud. Trick or treat?
As cloud adoption soars amid the pandemic”s increased data center costs and the need to support remote work, many CIOs standing on the sidelines can make one prediction about the future; they too will be moving to the cloud, like it or not. But cloud migration doesn”t have to be a horror movie, at least not with a partner like Qumulo. Let”s run down some tricks and treats around data migration to the cloud so we can make you feel like a kid who came home two full buckets of candy on Halloween night.
Today, an enterprise migrating to the cloud to run data-intensive workloads will not experience latency or diminished scale in the cloud. That means data storage is no longer a reason to stay on-premises and avoid the cloud. In fact, it”s just the opposite and earns a “trick” rating.
Storing file data in the cloud is a major factor driving cloud adoption in 2021. Why? It”s because enterprises need the capacity to support high-performance workloads and large volumes of unstructured data. This is especially true in industries such as life sciences, research computing, media and entertainment, medical imaging, and financial services – many of whom were scared of migrating data to the cloud initially. But today, this type of high-performance computing can best be run in the cloud – no need to fret!
What”s really scary is staying in your traditional NAS environment; cloud-first software like Qumulo just offers customers more options for the storage of data than the traditional NAS environment. Using Qumulo isn”t just a matter of performance or capacity, though we thrive at both – it”s about unlocking data value and enabling the entire data lifecycle. Hybrid cloud solutions, such as Qumulo Cloud Q, provide scale and performance equal to that of an old-school NAS approach without all the drawbacks. Nothing spooky about that!
Two years ago, maybe the on-prem NAS ghoul could jump out and yell “latency” and “capacity” to scare you out of moving your data to the cloud… Now companies across the globe are just strolling past to reach the candy bowl at Cloud Avenue.
Data migration to the cloud has major financial benefits as well. For one thing, the traditional buy, install, maintain and refresh lifecycle is gone. As cloud vendors take on all of those responsibilities, your organization”s time and resources will be shifted towards projects with high business impact and strong return on investment (ROI). In addition, cloud vendors have placed major data centers in strategic geographic areas. With major data governance regulations in place, you no longer need to set up an additional data center in a certain country in order to do business there. That”s two major scares removed for the global CIO!
If that weren”t enough, there”s no need to continue the terror of keeping up with current hardware specifications and vendors. Cloud migration negates several large IT costs not related to business productivity: buildings, taxes, hardware maintenance and refresh, and utility costs. All this scary overhead is absorbed by the cloud infrastructure provider. Wasn”t it more fun trick-or-treating with others? CIOs with strong cloud partners get just that feeling – nothing scary about it.
To maximize the value of your data you need appropriate cloud infrastructure and data storage that can not only handle the scale of your data but also make it easy to access and manage. Consider a financial services company looking to build an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict how likely a mortgage applicant would be to default on a new loan. That”s scary, right? Data of all kinds would need to be used by the model: historical applicant data, area foreclosures, interest rates, credit scores, and more.
The ghosts of storage past will tell you “BOO, you”ll never take all that to the cloud – it doesn”t have the capacity or the security.” But you can bust that data migration ghost by setting up a high-performance, petabyte-scale, secure, multi-protocol data storage infrastructure in the cloud that allows all that data to be rapidly transferred into AI modeling applications, like AWS SageMaker and IBM Watson. Suddenly that once-scary ghost is about as frightful as picking which candy to eat first.
What”s the least-scary thing to do in the cloud right now: Disaster Recovery! All the monsters under the bed – ransomware hackers, weather events, random disruptions – can threaten your precious data. Like the best nightlight and stuffed animal combo, Qumulo can help. Setting up a second site in the cloud, including through Qumulo Recover Q, allows you to failover back to secure data stored in the cloud should the worst happen.
Using Qumulo Recover Q in the cloud includes built-in data protection and security services, supports data mobility to and from cloud storage, and integrates with leading SIEM and backup and disaster recovery solutions for data protection. All this helps your organization sleep soundly knowing that even if those monsters crawl out from under the bed, you have a solution.
No wonder Gartner named us a leader for the 4th time running! Nothing scary about that.
Qumulo is the breakthrough leader in simplifying data management in its native file form at a massive scale across hybrid-cloud environments. Its high-performance file data platform is designed to store, manage and create workflows and applications with data in its native file form at massive scale on prem and in the public cloud. Qumulo is trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major film and animation studios, and some of the largest research facilities in the world to easily manage the full data lifecycle from ingestion, transformation, and publishing to archiving, with cost-effective capacity, dynamic scalability, automatic encryption, real-time visibility and an advanced API that enables customers to easily integrate Qumulo into their ecosystem and workflows. www.qumulo.com