Data Management Glossary
Cloud Data Management
What is Cloud Data Management?
Cloud data management is a way to manage data across cloud platforms, either with or instead of on-premises storage. A popular form of data storage management, the goal is to curb rising cloud data storage costs, but it can be quite a complicated pursuit, which is why most businesses employ an external company offering cloud data management services with the primary goal being cloud cost optimization.
Cloud data management is emerging as an alternative to data management using traditional on-premises software. The benefit of employing a top cloud data management company means that instead of buying on-premises data storage resources and managing them, resources are bought on-demand in the cloud. This cloud data management services model for cloud data storage allows organizations to receive dedicated data management resources on an as-needed basis. Cloud data management also involves finding the right data from on-premises storage and moving this data through data archiving, data tiering, data replication and data protection, or data migration to the cloud.
Advantages of Cloud Data Management
How to manage cloud storage? According to two 2023 surveys (here and here), 94% of respondents say they’re wasting money in the cloud, 69% say that data storage accounts for over one quarter of their company’s cloud costs and 94% said that cloud storage costs are rising. Optimal unstructured data management in the cloud provides four key capabilities that help with managing cloud storage and reduce your cloud data storage costs:
- Gain Accurate Visibility Across Cloud Accounts into Actual Usage
- Forecast Savings and Plan Data Management Strategies for Cloud Cost Optimization
- Cloud Tiering and Archiving Based on Actual Data Usage to Avoid Surprises
- For example, using last-accessed time vs. last modified provides a more predictable decision on the objects that will be accessed in the future, which avoids costly archiving errors.
- Radically Simplify Cloud Migrations
- Easily pick your source and destination
- Run dozens or hundreds of migrations in parallel
- Reduce the babysitting
The many benefits of cloud data management services include speeding up technology deployment and reducing system maintenance costs; it can also provide increased flexibility to help meet changing business requirements.
Challenges Faced with Enterprise Cloud Data Management
But, like other cloud computing technologies, enterprise cloud data management services can introduce challenges – for example, data security concerns related to sending sensitive business data outside the corporate firewall for storage. Another challenge is the disruption to existing users and applications who may be using file-based applications on premise since the cloud is predominantly object based.
Cloud data management service solutions should provide you with options to eliminate this disruption by transparently moving and managing data across common formats such as file and object.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management
Features of a Cloud Data Management Services Platform
Some common features and capabilities cloud data management solutions should deliver:
- Data Analytics: Can you get a view of all your cloud data, how it’s being used, and how much it’s costing you? Can you get visibility into on-premises data that you wish to migrate to the cloud? Can you understand where your costs are so you know what to do about them?
- Planning and Forecasting: Can you set policies for how data should get moved either from one cloud storage class to another or from an on-premises storage to the cloud. Can you project your savings? Does this account for hidden fees like retrieval and egress costs?
- Policy based data archiving, data replication, and data management: How much babysitting do you have to do to move and manage data? Do you have to tell the system every time something needs to be moved or does it have policy based intelligent automation?
- Fast Reliable Cloud Data Migration: Does the system support migrating on-premises data to the cloud? Does it handle going over a Wide Area Network? Does it handle your permissions and access controls and preserve security of data both while it’s moving the data and in the cloud?
- Intelligent Cloud Archiving, Intelligent Tiering and Data Lifecycle Management: Does the solution enable you to manage ongoing data lifecycle in the cloud? Does it support the different cloud storage classes (eg High-performance options like File and Cloud NAS and cost-efficient options like Amazon S3 and Glacier)?
In practice, the design and architecture of a cloud varies among cloud providers. Service Level Agreements (SLA) represent the contract which captures the agreed upon guarantees between a service provider and its customers.
It is important to consider that cloud administrators are responsible for factoring:
- Multiple billable dimensions and costs: storage, access, retrievals, API, transitions, initial transfer, and minimal storage-time costs
- Unexpected costs of moving data across different storage classes. Unless access is continually monitored and data is moved back up when it gets hot, you’ll face expensive retrieval fees.
This complexity is the reason why only a mere 20% of organizations are leveraging the cost-saving options available to them in the cloud.
How do Cloud Data Management Services Tools work?
As more enterprise data runs on public cloud infrastructure, many different types of tools and approaches to cloud data management have emerged. The initial focus has been on migrating and managing structured data in the cloud. Cloud data integration, ETL (extraction, transformation and loading), and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) tools are designed to move and manage enterprise applications and databases in the cloud. These tools typically move and manage bulk or batch data or real time data.
Cloud-based analytics and cloud data warehousing have emerged for analyzing and managing hybrid and multi-cloud structured and semi-structured data, such as Snowflake and Databricks.
In the world of unstructured data storage and backup technologies, cloud data management has been driven by the need for cost visibility, cost reduction, cloud cost optimization and optimizing cloud data. As file-level tiering has emerged as a critical component of an intelligent data management strategy and more file data is migrating to the cloud, cloud data management is evolving from cost management to automation and orchestration, governance and compliance, performance monitoring, and security. Even so, spend management continues to be a top priority for any enterprise IT organizing migrating application and data workloads to the cloud.
What are the challenges faced with Cloud Data Management security?
Most of the cloud data management security concerns are related to general cloud computing security questions organizations face. It’s important to evaluate the strengths and security certifications of your cloud data management vendor as part of your overall cloud strategy
Is adoption of Cloud Data Management services growing?
As enterprise IT organizations are increasingly running hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge computing infrastructure, cloud data management services have emerged as a critical requirement. Look for solutions that are open, cross-platform, and ensure you always have native access to your data. Visibility across silos has become a critical need in the enterprise, but it’s equally important to ensure data does not get locked into a proprietary solution that will disrupt users, applications, and customers. The need for cloud native data access and data mobility should not be underestimated. In addition to visibility and access, cloud data management services must enable organizations to take the right action in order to move data to the right place and the right time. The right cloud data management solution will reduce storage, backup and cloud costs as well as ensure a maximum return on the potential value from all enterprise data.
How is Enterprise Cloud Data Management Different from Consumer Systems?
While consumers need to manage cloud storage, it is usually a matter of capacity across personal storage and devices. Enterprise cloud data management involves IT organizations working closely with departments to build strategies and plans that will ensure unstructured data growth is managed and data is accessible and available to the right people at the right time.
Enterprise IT organizations are increasingly adopting cloud data management solutions to understand how cloud (typically multi-cloud) data is growing and manage its lifecycle efficiently across all of their cloud file and object storage options.
Analyzing and Managing Cloud Storage with Komprise
- Get accurate analytics across clouds with a single view across all your users’ cloud accounts and buckets and save on storage costs with an analytics-driven approach.
- Forecast cloud cost optimization by setting different data lifecycle policies based on your own cloud costs.
- Establish policy-based multi-cloud lifecycle management by continuously moving objects by policy across storage classes transparently (e.g., Amazon Standard, Standard-IA, Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive).
- Accelerate cloud data migrations with fast, efficient data migrations across clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google and Wasabi) and even on-premises (ECS, IBM COS, Pure FlashBlade).
- Deliver powerful cloud-to-cloud data replication by running, monitoring, and managing hundreds of migrations faster than ever at a fraction of the cost with Elastic Data Migration.
- Keep your users happy with no retrieval fee surprises and no disruption to users and applications from making poor data movement decisions based on when the data was created.
A cloud data management platform like Komprise, named a Gartner Peer Insights Awards leader, that is analytics-driven, can help you save 50% or more on your cloud storage costs.
Learn more about your options for migrating file workloads to the cloud: The Easy, Fast, No Lock-In Path to the Cloud.
What is Cloud Data Management?
Cloud Data Management is a way to analyze, manage, secure, monitor and move data across public clouds. It works either with, or instead of on-premises applications, databases, and data storage and typically offers a run-anywhere platform.
Cloud Data Management Services
Cloud data management is typically overseen by a vendor that specializes in data integration, database, data warehouse or data storage technologies. Ideally the cloud data management solution is data agnostic, meaning it is independent from the data sources and targets it is monitoring, managing and moving. Benefits of an enterprise cloud data management solution include ensuring security, large savings, backup and disaster recovery, data quality, automated updates and a strategic approach to analyzing, managing and migrating data.
Cloud Data Management platform
Cloud data management platforms are cloud based hubs that analyze and offer visibility and insights into an enterprises data, whether the data is structured, semi-structured or unstructured.