In part 1 of this two-part series, I reviewed the latest research and thinking on the state of the cloud; things have changed in a year. Here’s a quick synopsis of what has become a cloudy market for cloud infrastructure spending:
- Public cloud leaders’ earnings and near-term forecasts are soft, likely due to more conservative spending during an economic downturn;
- Enterprises are not giving up on the cloud and most will maintain or even increase spending this year;
- Cloud data storage costs are rising and repatriation is likely happening at some level;
- IT leaders will focus on optimizing cloud spend and reducing waste ASAP;
- CSPs may look to retain customers with better pricing plans and smarter tools to optimize and track spending and consumption.
When planning your cloud strategy this year and forward, we don’t recommend a sharp pullback on the cloud. After all, hybrid cloud is still the future and a well-optimized cloud infrastructure is how organizations can be more agile, competitive and drive innovation faster than ever.
However, during a time of belt-tightening, enterprise IT leaders need to sharply optimize cloud resources to save money, operate more sustainably and ensure value. The vast majority (83%) of companies are concerned about a recession in 2023, according to research by Spiceworks Ziff Davis. The survey also showed that most IT organizations aren’t planning to decrease spending but 43% will reduce non-essential spending.
Consider this: cloud object storage tiers are 10 to 30 times less expensive than cloud file storage options. If you could transparently tier and offload cold data (which is often 80% of all data) to cloud object storage, you could reduce the storage cost of that data by 10x to 30x.
Ultimately, the question is not about datacenter versus cloud: each model has pros and cons for different workloads and use cases. The prevailing issue is that if you do not efficiently manage data over its lifecycle, both options will be expensive. Don’t keep cold data on expensive, Tier 1 storage and backup resources when it can safely move to cheaper, secondary storage in the cloud.
Komprise Brings Actionable Analysis to Reduce Cloud Data Storage Costs
Komprise analyzes your file and object data regardless of where it lives. It can transparently tier and migrate data based on your policies to maximize cost savings without compromising user access.
Continual analytics for the most cost-effective placement
Komprise Analysis scans data across silos to deliver insights on usage, growth and costs. This gives IT a way to create a nuanced versus one-size-fits-all data management strategy. Many of our customers discover that most of their data is cold — which guides decisions to move that data from NAS to cloud object storage. While developing life-saving vaccines in 2020, our customer, Pfizer tiered 2PB of cold data to AWS S3, saving 75% on backup and data storage costs. Pfizer continues to tier and migrate data to object storage as it ages, so the savings are ongoing.
Transparent cloud tiering
Komprise employs file-based cloud tiering with Komprise Transparent Move Technology (TMT)™. The tiered file still looks like it is on the source as a file and users and applications can access it as before without disruption. However, Komprise translates the file and stores it as an object on S3 or Azure Blob in its native form. The user can access these objects natively from the cloud and as files natively from the source. This way, Komprise leverages the lower cost of object storage while providing full transparency. This transparency coupled with dramatic cost savings is what made it possible for Pfizer to tier data even while under pressure to develop the Covid vaccine. This is key to cost savings; customers share stories with us that before TMT, they could only tier a small fraction of their cold data because users and departments balked. There was too much risk to future access. Now with Komprise TMT, that risk is gone!
Cloud data lifecycle management
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f your organization has an aggressive cloud strategy that entails moving large volumes of data, consider the Komprise approach for Smart Data Migration. Migrate the hot data to cloud file storage and the cold data to cloud object storage to optimize cloud spend. You can also configure Komprise to automatically move the files down to still lower cost tiers based on access patterns.
Optimize file data search and workflows for AI
A major roadblock with AI/ML projects is finding just the right data. The Komprise Global File Index and Smart Data Workflows help users search for certain files or tags across data silos with a simple Google-like experience. Then they can systematically enrich the data with more metadata and move it to AI and ML analytics platforms. This speeds up time to value for big data analytics programs. For example, a user can tag data collected from self-driving cars with information about driving conditions. Later, users can search these enriched data sets to analyze vehicle performance and safety.
Get Your File Data AI-Ready!
Organizations are seeing outcomes that simply weren’t possible until recently with cloud AI and ML. A cloud-based medical imaging system owned by Mass General Brigham uses AI-based diagnostics to dramatically speed test results, such as mammograms, according to VentureBeat. Cloud-based AI and ML will only grow and enterprises don’t want to be left behind.
IDC forecasts that by 2025, nearly 50% of all accelerated infrastructure for performance-intensive computing (including AI and HPC) will be cloud-based.
Final Thoughts: Know First. Move Smart.
Developing a cloud strategy for the next 12 months won’t be easy. Many IT leaders are feeling pressure from above to cut extraneous costs and justify everything. Spending without a clear ROI and upon specious results won’t be popular.
Komprise delivers an intelligent use of cloud resources in a non-proprietary method. This means your organization can continue its cloud journey with assurance and realize the following benefits:
Stop Overspending on Storage: Cut significant costs from your cloud data storage spend, across a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment. Extend the life of your existing storage and leverage cost-efficient options instead of continuously buying more storage.
Keep Your Users/Apps Happy: Invest in the cloud in a “future proof” manner which delivers long-term flexibility and a non-disruptive user experience.
Be AI Ready: Gain a competitive advantage by leveraging automated actions and workflows to discover and move the right unstructured data sets to cloud AI and ML tools and services. Read my blog on this opportunity for AI-enabled unstructured data analytics.
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