The past two years have seen a dramatic change in data’s role within organizations. From exponential increases in the amount of data produced to agility in maximizing and optimizing that data for the long term, enterprises have discovered the pivotal role multicloud plays in determining resilience.
IDC predicts that by next year, more than 90% of enterprises worldwide will rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs. With businesses looking to make up for lost time and focusing beyond day-to-day concerns, the move toward hybrid multicloud infrastructures is accelerating.
The rapid growth in data and its sources—customer transactions, CRM data, sales records, employee information, and new sources of data, such as IoT—has pushed the effective storage, management and protection of it all beyond many businesses’ current capabilities. Add on challenges like natural disasters and the expanding sophistication of cyberattacks, and the ability to stay resilient and maintain mission-critical systems becomes tougher by the minute. Furthermore, data analytics and AI are drawing on current resources, both on-premises and cloud. Leveraging container technology for these applications is a viable way to simplify and speed develop and updates, but the infrastructure must be able to keep up.
Spanning private, public, and hybrid cloud, a hybrid multicloud storage solution supports the security, orchestration, and management needed to integrate, extend, and automate your storage environment.
What is Hybrid Multicloud?
It may sound like a fancy word, and a bit complicated, but many organizations are already utilizing a hybrid multicloud environment. If your data is moving across multiple public clouds and your private cloud, your architecture is no longer just hybrid cloud—it’s hybrid multicloud.
Hybrid multicloud environments interconnect multiple public clouds, private clouds and traditional resources to seamlessly work together while dodging data silos. It improves overall agility and helps you control costs by enabling the movement and collaboration needed to leverage business data and applications across all areas of your company.
According to research conducted by the IBM Institute of Business Value, organizations that are already using multiple clouds regularly to deliver one of more business functions outperformed their counterparts on several key metrics, including revenue growth and profitability.
The Benefits of Consistent Storage
A hybrid multicloud storage approach enables you optimize the movement, placement and management of your data, whether your it’s on premises or in multiple clouds. Let’s take a look at some of the potential benefits you can expect when it comes to hybrid multicloud.
Data Economics
More data requires more storage capacity. Storage capacity in the public cloud is effectively unlimited without the budget burdens of buying actual devices, paying for power and cooling, or having to repair or replace them. Instead with a hybrid multicloud you pay for the storage capacity you need, when you need it without compromising performance or security.
Having the ability to easily share and move data among storage systems makes your business more agile in addressing disruption. We all learned this as employees transitioned to work-from-home during the pandemic. Being able to quickly, and even automatically, move data sets between clouds, know its status, give permissions or establish policies for access, frees your business to meet demands, whatever may arise.
A modern hybrid multicloud solutions can also increase performance via automation. You can manage multiple clusters across different technology platforms for public and private clouds, containers and Kubernetes. Having the ability to access this information when and where you need it can increase efficiency and save you valuable time.
Business Resilience
Two valuable aspects of a hybrid multicloud storage architecture are its high availability and disaster recovery. Tools within the multicloud environment provide the choice of synchronous or asynchronous replication, automatic two- or three-site replication and metro or global replication distances—all to meet your business objectives and budget constraints.
Data protection is another area where a robust hybrid multicloud environment can pay real dividends. A key to any effective multicloud solution is that it relies heavily on software-defined storage (SDS) technologies and capabilities. This SDS layer provides flexibility and additional functionality, including various encryption capabilities.
Application Deployment
Individual silos of data, often duplicated data, put all of your data out of sync. A hybrid multicloud strategy with storage virtualization can deliver data unification and a single source of truth, giving you a centralized view of all your data—no matter where it sits within your enterprise. From the virtualization layer, you can begin to unify your data across your enterprise and gain the insights you need for AI and big data analytics.
To ensure your developers can focus on their apps and operations can focus on the infrastructure, you need to package and isolate applications within their entire runtime environment. Containing these applications makes it easy to move them between environments, such as development, testing and production, while enabling them to be fully functional, reducing conflicts between your teams.
The IBM Difference
IBM’s next generation hybrid cloud provides a common platform across all of your cloud, on-premises and edge environments. That means you can skill once, build once and manage from a single pane of glass.
- Build and run anywhere – Develop and consume cloud services anywhere with consistency across any cloud or any location.
- Proven security, compliance and governance – Consistent security and control posture across all applications that provides the highest levels of cloud security and monitoring.
- Industry expertise – IBM has the most qualified experts in the hybrid approach to industry to streamline business workflow transformation with automation and AI.
- Automate and modernize – IBM automation capabilities can help you implement intelligent workflows with ease of integration and a consistent application development lifecycle.
The Gold Standard
As an IBM Gold Partner, i-Virtualize has built our business on a cornerstone of IBM storage solutions, enabling our clients to effectively manage and secure their data—on-premises and in the cloud. Our team of IBM-certified engineers has decades of experience helping clients get more out of their technology investment and achieve their long-term storage goals.
Contact us today at info@i-virtualize.com to find out how a hybrid multicloud environment can break down storage barriers for your business and open the door to greater opportunities.
