Komprise recently hosted a webinar featuring Anthony Fiore, Senior Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Krishna Subramanian, co-founder and COO of Komprise.
Cloud Adoption in Health & Life Sciences
Krishna kicked things off talking about how we’re in data explosion mode and how enterprise IT organizations are looking to the cloud to address their growing volumes of unstructured data. In the first phase of cloud adoption, organizations created new applications in the cloud. New models of building and managing these cloud native apps emerged like DevOps.
We’re now in the second phase of cloud adoption, where enterprise IT teams are looking to migrate and manage core file-based applications and workloads to the cloud. Anthony commented on how difficult it is to refactor all of these applications and meet the corporate mandate to get to the cloud and save on cost.
He noted: “It’s great that there’s a tool like Komprise out there that lets customers have their cake and eat it too. They can adopt a cloud strategy without having to refactor applications for NAS data.”
File data management challenges in life sciences
Krishna reviewed the challenges we see in data-heavy Life Sciences, Genomics, and Healthcare organizations when it comes to moving core-file workloads to AWS. Common characteristics include:
- Generating TBs of data daily means an ever-increasing footprint
- Moving to a “cloud-first” strategy
- Datacenter space is limited
- A lot of file data
- Data is valuable but a lot of data is inactive and cold
- Need to move to the cloud without disrupting researchers and applications
- Need to use data in AWS without requiring third-party tools
Anthony shared a story about a healthcare customer he worked with who had cold data today, but knew that it might not be cold next week. They needed a solution that could grow with them as there are peaks and valleys of demand as the temperature of the data changes.
Another nice thing about Komprise, he shared, is that it moves files in native format. The goal is to unlock the value of the data, not just do a one-way cloud data migration.
Before the demo, we had a good discussion about what has historically prevented enterprise IT organizations from taking a more data-centric approach to storage and why this is changing. “The IT industry doesn’t have a storage problem; it has a data management problem,,” as Gartner has said.
Why?
- Lack of awareness: We’re used to running out of capacity and buying more storage. We’re used to backing up everything. We’re now in a position where this won’t work anymore. It’s too expensive. The backups are taking too long. Data volumes are growing fast and storage budgets are staying flat.
- Data value wasn’t the priority: There is now a recognition on the importance of analytics and ultimately the value of data. To know first and plan and say, “I don’t to back up everything on our most expensive backup solution because 80% of the data hasn’t changed.”
- Storage-centric mindset: Changing the mindset to recognizing that buying more capacity is not the answer.
Anthony summarized it this way:
“Having been on the customer side for most of my career, I’m well aware of the refresh cycles, and the process of budgeting and buying more storage. You’ve got to think about the overhead and factor in growth for projects that haven’t even been considered yet. Companies of all sizes are trying to optimize their spend and keep a tight lid on expenses and even capital purchases. They want to make sure they’re doing things in the most efficient way as possible.”
Komprise Benefits for Life Sciences & Healthcare
- Komprise sits outside the hot data path. It’s not adding latency. It’s not impactful to the actual NAS system or the applications. It’s almost like a background process so it’s not going to cause your NAS systems to overheat, so to speak, from a performance perspective.
- Komprise moves data to the cloud natively and doesn’t lock the data in. The customer always is always in control of their data, not the storage or backup vendors.
- Anthony is sometimes asked, “who owns the S3 bucket?” The answer is the customer. The customer maintains full control at all times.
- Komprise retains all of the metadata when it moves data. This way, IT can build virtual data lakes across all storage (cloud and on-prem). She showed an example of searching for all data tagged as “project X” and you quickly see the actual file data sitting in different shares.
Watch the full on-demand webinar on intelligent data management in health and life sciences by Komprise.
