November! It’s time to rake leaves, finalize Thanksgiving plans, and ponder what if anything you can do with all the leftover candy from Halloween. We’re also in the midst of conference season: Microsoft and NetApp just wrapped their annual shows and AWS re:Invent is right around the corner. Here’s our take on intriguing IT infrastructure and data trends reported in the trades, along with our own news.
Microsoft Ignite Validates Hybrid Cloud
With fall conference season in full swing, Microsoft Ignite had a slew of announcements with a focus on hybrid cloud management and Azure Arc, as reported in TechCrunch. With many customers straddling cloud and on-premises infrastructure, Microsoft Azure sees value in helping orchestrate VMs and containers across clouds and data centers.
Small Players Make Headway in the Cloud Game
When you think of the cloud, the Big 3 come to mind (AWS, Azure, GCP) but some smaller players have been proving there is still room in the cloud storage market with offerings for small businesses, as reported in Protocol. “Neither Backblaze nor Cloudflare are in a position to challenge industry leaders like AWS, Microsoft and Google any time soon for the breadth and depth of cloud infrastructure business. But they both realize that catering to smaller companies represents a potential new era in the history of the cloud.”
Redefining the Role of Data
eWeek is challenging The Economist’s 2017 article where they compared data to oil. To be fair, The Economist said that data had replaced oil as the world’s most valuable commodity versus being the “new oil,” but eWeek’s comparison of data to uranium is poignant. They make the point that data, like uranium, can be used for good or it can be weaponized, and that it requires tremendous care to manage data properly for the long term and to create value.
Data Analytics: Not Just for Data Scientists Anymore
CNBC reports that Databricks, the data analysis and AI software startup, is making its second acquisition for “low” or “no code” to enable the creation of data applications by non-computer scientists. “Bringing simple capabilities to Databricks is a critical step in empowering more people within an organization to easily analyze and explore large sets of data, regardless of expertise,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. This reflects a trend of extending capabilities that traditionally were limited to IT teams to line of business employees, much like Komprise Deep Analytics Actions.
Data Pros: Facing Burnout 
Another reason to make data analytics usable by a wider audience is the short supply of data engineers compounded by a high attrition rate. Datanami cites a jointly produced DataKitchen and data.world survey that found 97% of the 600 data engineers surveyed reported feeling “burned out,” with another 70% saying they are likely to quit in the next 12 months.
Komprise News & Updates
Komprise Recognized as Best Enterprise Data Management Solution
Komprise was named a winner in the 2021 Software and Technology Awards by New World Report. “We are seeing a marketplace shift from managing storage to managing data and our mission is to help customers make that transition with an independent, analytics-driven data management solution,” said Krishna Subramanian, COO and president of Komprise, in the press release.
Komprise Achieves Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency
This designation recognizes that Komprise, an existing AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Tier Partner, delivers proven technology for rapid, large-scale cloud data migrations to help customers move successfully to AWS through all phases of complex migration projects, discovery, planning, migration and operations. The joint announcement details the Komprise solution that AWS customers trust to reliably and efficiently move data to the cloud.
Storage Pros Evolving to Data Roles
Komprise’s long time storage industry expert Rob Gordon wrote for InformationWeek about the shift of traditional storage administrators to cloud data management pros. With many of the arcane tasks of storage now automated, most of the storage person’s time will now be spent identifying, segmenting and defining data types and managing that data granularly, according to business and user needs.
The announcement of Komprise Deep Analytics Actions last month has been creating some buzz in industry press.
Google your Cloud with Komprise
How to describe Komprise Deep Analytics in one sentence: “Imagine a Google search you can act on,” says Komprise co-founder and COO Krishna Subramanian in TechTarget. “This is helping IT and business users find specific data sets and use them in a business workflow that was manual in the past.” The Google analogy illustrates the challenge of scattered data and a simple approach to empowering customers, including less traditional non-IT staff, to drive value from data.
Get the Big Picture by Controlling Scattered Data 
VentureBeat focuses on Komprise Deep Analytics Actions efficiencies of finding and moving only the data required for a specific analytic task versus the massive time and expense of bulk data moves.
Taking on Healthcare Challenges with a Data-First Approach
With petabytes of data, heterogenous storage and data intensive medical applications all contributing to the quality of care and their life critical mission, St. Luke’s decided to implement a data-first strategy using Komprise. St. Luke’s expects to save as much as 80% on storage with this initiative. The healthcare organization will also leverage Deep Analytics capabilities in Komprise to understand the unique requirements of different clinical file types. Read the blog!
