Modern businesses are built on data. How do today’s leaders best empower their organizations to maximize the value of that data?
Recently I spoke with ESG’s Senior Analyst Scott Sinclair about how organizations are leveraging the cloud for their file data. ESG research found that 86% of IT organizations are currently leveraging the public cloud to store active data; 65% of them are leveraging it for file data storage.
What’s driving public cloud adoption and how organizations are leveraging the cloud for file data?
We commonly see two scenarios among Qumulo customers:
-
- The applications are driving the move to the cloud, which then pulls data along with them. Customers are moving applications to manage electronic medical records (EMRs), 4K video for media and entertainment content creation, and manufacturing anomaly detection, among others. When these workloads go to the cloud, they need a file data platform that works with them by providing performance, speed and availability without having to re-write applications.
- The data lake is driving the move to the cloud. We see many of our customers thinking strategically about how to design a cloud data lake for structured and unstructured data. As one example, we have a pharmaceutical customer that’s putting 40PB of its drug discovery research in the cloud. They defined a data lake first and then pulled the applications along with the data.
In either of those scenarios, Qumulo’s high performance file data platform can help organizations leverage the power of the public cloud by moving their data to their cloud-based applications, or by helping them design their data lake architecture.
ESG research also found that when it comes to managing the rapid rate of unstructured storage, 41% experience data migration challenges, and 41% have data protection difficulties. For organizations looking to build out a hybrid cloud storage environment for unstructured data, a good first step to start with might be the following:
- Ask the question, “what parts of this solution do I want to own, manage and run myself, and what parts can be done with a SaaS or managed service?” Addressing that consideration across all of the stakeholders in your organization – business, operations, security, finance, etc – will help you define your options. For example, you might have to run some parts of the infrastructure on-prem, and in others, you might want to run it better, faster, cheaper in the cloud.
- The second question to consider is what industry solutions and reference architectures your organization can leverage. Whether it’s best practices for research and high performance computing (HPC), media and entertainment, healthcare, or public sector, there are standard reference architectures out there for data. As one example in the oil and gas space, a number of organizations have come together and developed the Open Subsurface Data Universe. Shell is a part of that organization that defines very structured architectures that can be leveraged across the industry.
Click the video below to watch my full conversation with Scott, and learn how organizations are currently leveraging the cloud, the challenges they face, and how Qumulo can address those concerns, while helping our customers maximize the value of their data.
Learn more
For more information on how Qumulo is helping organizations leverage the power of the public cloud, watch this on-demand webinar, Do Amazing Things With Your File Data in the Cloud, and download our eBook, Unleash the Power of Your File Data in the Cloud.
Contact us here if you’d like to set up a meeting or request a demo. And subscribe to our blog for more helpful best practices and resources!
