Of late remote work has become the standard modus operandi in many organizations. A shift that was underway for several years now was finally hastened on by the pandemic. Now organizations that required employees to come in regularly pre-pandemic for reasons like community, leadership and even security are showing more resilience toward remote work policy. This has fired up cloud migration. At the recent Cloud Field Day event in Santa Clara, CA, Komprise showcased their data management platform that helps companies intelligently exploit the full benefits of cloud in a highly cost-effective way.
Cloud Is Inevitable
Already enterprises were leaning on cloud more in the wake of data center consolidation. Public cloud presented to them the impossibly good opportunity to wrap up their in-house infrastructures which were biting huge chunks out of their budgets.
To cut their costs, a lot of the companies started heavily using cloud. But cost aside, cloud has another big payoff and that is support for IT modernization. Cloud has caused wholesale modernization of applications, changing dated legacy applications into modern cloud-based ones thus completing the final big step to digital transformation.
Overspending in the Cloud Is Easier Than You Think
But now that the board-level decision has been made and companies have crossed the threshold and come into the full-serviced infrastructure of public cloud, what now?
Cloud maybe a cost-saving alternative, but it’s not cheap, let alone free, and if you don’t have a tight control over your cloud spend right from the start, your cloud footprints can skyrocket in a heartbeat and put you back thousands of dollars.
Unlocking the Full Potential of Cloud
To extract full ROI out of this transformation, companies need to have some strategies in place when migrating and tiering data to cloud. A data-centric approach at the very basic can help enterprises find that balance between overspending and getting more bang for their buck.
Komprise lays down the formula to unlocking the full potential of cloud into three key pieces- maximum data efficiency, maximum data access and maximum data services. Kumar Goswami, CEO and Co-Founder of Komprise expanded on these. He explained that if you can put your data in the cloud in a native format, you can have access to all of it directly. In addition to that, you would also be able to use all the different tiers of storage in the cloud and leverage their different capabilities of performance and resiliency.
But when you want to tier to the cloud, you have to remember that the file systems on premises have proprietary block systems underneath them that give them the performance you require. When you’re moving these proprietary blocks to cloud, you may not have the entire data sets there which prevents you from availing all the services. Vendors are continuously adding new tiers with different price and performance capabilities. So as new tiers come in, users are beholden until the storage array moves to the newer tiers, Goswami illustrates.
Cloud Transformation with Komprise
At the recent Cloud Field Day event in Silicon Valley, Goswami demonstrated the cloud tiering capabilities of Komprise. In a short presentation, he explained about how companies can maximize data efficiency and data access with cost-effective data management with Komprise.
Komprise is a storage-agnostic data management plane that takes a data-centric approach to cloud tiering. It’s a global layer that can be deployed across on-premises filesystems, object stores and multi-cloud to manage unstructured data.
Komprise enables smart and effective management of data in three key ways- visibility, mobility and value. Irrespective of where the data is, all of it can be viewed, searched and analyzed on the Komprise platform. That gives administrators one central location to turn to, to view the state of all data, query and analyze datasets and use them strategically. They can use the platform as required to create data lakes for sophisticated workloads, keep a tab on storage usage or to optimize cloud costs.
The second and most crucial part is data management. Leveraging a patented technology called Transparent Move Technology (TMT), Komprise tiers, migrates, moves and archives data without using any agent. Native data access enables users to access all tiered and archived data sets like on premises. Moving data at file-level with all of their metadata preserved, Komprise delivers full fidelity no matter what tier.
Komprise allows users to migrate data between the storage arrays of the same vendors without requiring rehydrating massive amounts of tiered data. With it, users can transparently access data between storage arrays. Smart replication allows production of DR copies of select data that can be stored in a location of your choice thus avoiding producing large amounts of data replication which only accelerates data footprint and expenses in the cloud.
Wrapping Up
The lure of cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model fades quickly as companies find themselves footing massive bills on a regular basis. In cloud, things like subscription and high egress fees may not be in the users’ control, but they can very well be in control of their cloud consumption and that starts with clear visibility of cloud resource utilization by unit. Komprise increases transparency and visibility into cloud usage while offering a bundle of tiering capabilities all of which are designed to help identify cost savings and get the most value out of cloud investment. That makes it a great tool to have in the tool kit while performing cloud migration.
To learn more about Komprise, be sure to check out the deep-dive presentations by Komprise from the recent Cloud Field Day event.
