Amazon AWS has long been considered distant and distinct from the enterprise datacenter. But AWS Outposts, which was announced as generally available at AWS re:Invent 2019, brings this cloud into enterprise datacenters. It’s likely that this new capability will increase enterprise use of AWS, posing challenges for enterprises and administrators. And companies providing software and services must adapt or be left behind.
Changing Workloads, Changing Careers
The transition to the cloud is going to dramatically impact the daily life and work of IT staff. Just as workloads are transitioning to new models, the people managing them are changing their careers and focus. At re:Invent, I discussed this transition with Stephen Manley and Mike Palmer of Druva. They suggest approaching this as an opportunity to show value to management and move forward. I appreciated this positive view of change, and hope more IT administrators will take it to heart!
Once they are freed from day-to-day IT management tasks, IT staff can begin to look at how to leverage systems and data to benefit the company. Manley and Palmer suggest that staff should show that they’re part of the new wave of cloud applications and tools. Learn new tools like SageMaker and play with data! That’s why it’s so important that applications have open APIs to access this metadata. Just imagine all the ways you can remix backup data into valuable business intelligence.
Another topic of conversation is the “first class” status of cloud applications. Some workloads are more appropriate to be placed in the cloud, but this doesn’t make them any less enterprise-grade. That’s why management tools and data protection are critical for cloud applications. And Outposts makes this even more important, since it will accelerate the transition to cloud infrastructure.
Enterprises are Moving to the Cloud
As enterprises move applications to the cloud, they must have enterprise-class data protection. But most backup solutions are not cloud capable. How can we protect both cloud and on-premises EC2 instances? That’s what Druva CloudRanger does, bringing enterprise-grade backup features to cloud native workloads.
Druva supports AWS Outposts with both CloudRanger and Phoenix, allowing customers to protect cloud data as well as conventional server data. Phoenix will use AWS as both an infrastructure and target for data protection, and Outposts effectively give Druva an appliance offering without the need to develop and support hardware.
Stephen’s Stance
AWS re:Invent 2019 is a huge conference, with a critical mass of enterprise vendors and IT attendees, yet cloud represents just a few percentage points of enterprise spend. There is a massive opportunity to transform both infrastructure and IT careers! My conversations with Druva at re:Invent really brought home the challenge and opportunity of the cloud.
