By Hemant Tiwari
Today’s new normal, mandated by COVID-19, gives us a glimpse into the future—one that will become increasingly remote, digital, and virtual. It also heralds the next in cloud infrastructure, as digital becomes the cornerstone of successful enterprises. As these enterprises journey into the digital-first future, they face continuous challenges of cyber threats, data outages, and legacy systems. In the process, customer trust and growth are at imminent risk.
To overcome these pitfalls, enterprises need a turning point—one that ushers real-time asset discovery and monitoring, continuous compliance, zero vulnerabilities, 100 percent data availability, and intelligent operations. To reach this turning point, enterprises need to reinforce and modernize cloud investments toward automation, flash storage, and modernization:
Automation
Gartner predicts that through 2023, 90 percent of cloud failures will be the customer’s fault. In 2019, when a global hospitality and entertainment company failed to safeguard access to cloud servers, it caused a security incident that leaked personal identification information of 10.6 million visitors.
Thus, today’s cloud strategies—involving private, public, and hybrid architectures—need a strong line of defense. Many enterprises that invest in multi-cloud architectures become vulnerable to risks caused by misconfigurations, poor account management, inability to govern multiple cloud platforms, and lack of compliance.
These enterprises need the shield of end-to-end cloud security that provides cutting-edge alerting, reporting, and automation capabilities. Automation will play a key role in offering real-time visibility into the cloud footprint, embedding security checks early in the process lifecycle, and deploying comprehensive threat protection programs.
Flash storage
Earlier in 2020, Google Cloud platform experienced an outage that impacted access to Gmail and Google Drive and hindered the accessibility of apps like Snapchat. More recently, issues with IBM Cloud infrastructure have affected the company’s website and hampered the functioning of customer websites like Techmeme.
These unfortunate examples are a wake-up call for enterprises looking to build stable and robust data center operations. To ensure 100 percent data availability, reliability, and cost-efficiency, enterprises need advanced storage solutions, such as flash-powered cloud platforms.
Embracing all-flash cloud data infrastructure that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) transforms an enterprise’s ability to manage and derive value from data. It virtualizes data storage to simplify operations, offers robust container support to accelerate DevOps, modernizes data protection and storage to lower risks, and much more.
A leading healthcare provider in the United States faced challenges with providing reliable information to healthcare professionals. That is when it chose to modernize the data center. The new data center was powered by a hybrid cloud flash infrastructure that provided healthcare professionals with fast and reliable data. What is more, the company successfully brought down storage costs by 10-fold, increased agility, and improved patient care.
Modernization
Modern data infrastructure is vital to survive and thrive in today’s digital world. It is imperative to have cutting-edge infrastructure that enhances governance, mobility, and analytics of data. Infrastructure modernization is also crucial to safeguarding data, besides enhancing efficiency.
It mandates agile data storage, hyper-converged data solutions, and intelligent operations. As enterprises evolve, new configurations and systems add complexities to data center operations and impede operational efficiency. Enterprises need intelligent software that can predict, prescribe, and act automatically to ensure that customer experiences are always optimal. Integrating on-premises and cloud storage and leveraging a robust content platform are also crucial ingredients in the modernization recipe.
Cloud is no longer in the backseat on the enterprise’s journey toward growth. Adopting a robust multi-cloud infrastructure will act as a turning point toward security, agility, and efficiency. It will navigate IT infrastructure pain points and overtake data protection challenges that keep CxOs up at night. Therefore, the right strategy and approach to multi-cloud infrastructure will fast forward enterprises to tomorrow, today.
(The author is Vice President & Managing Director, Hitachi Vantara, India & SAARC)