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The events of last year caused organizations to shift gears quickly, often accelerating the timeline for their cloud strategy – including the adoption or expansion of remote work capabilities.
The cloud handily demonstrated its business value as it enabled organizations to keep going. In fact, Gartner found that nearly 70% of organizations that use cloud services today intend to increase their cloud spending for this reason.
Because speed was of the essence, many organizations quickly erected short-term cloud scaffolding, some using almost a lift-and-shift approach. That worked as a short-term fix, but what’s needed now is a plan for the long haul of the cloud transformation journey. Because data is a key asset for corporations during this journey, this is where fast object storage can play a significant part.
In this article, we’ll look at six important data points and trends related to cloud transformation and fast object storage, provided by the experts at Scality.
Data Point No. 1: Cloud spending is up
Gartner forecasts that overall cloud services spending around the world will grow by nearly 25% in the next four years. And, cloud is projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024.
Data Point No. 2: Vendor lock-in is a major challenge
As the pandemic observes its first birthday, many companies are just beginning to consider their longer-term cloud strategy. But they must take into account certain challenges to overcome in the long term. One of them is cloud vendor lock-in, like the hardware/software lock-in of old. While many companies are talking about a hybrid or multi-cloud approach, this isn’t always actually happening, largely because of issues related to vendor lock-in.
Data Point No. 3: App refactoring is a must
App refactoring is another challenge to long-term cloud success. Refactoring involves running your applications on your cloud provider’s infrastructure – in other words, you have to completely re-architect your applications to better fit and optimize for the new cloud or cloud-native environments. You have to ensure that while making application code changes, you don’t affect the external behavior of the app. And that gets dicey.
Data Point No. 4: Object storage offers scale and speed
“Secondary” data — backups and long-term archives — have been the purview of object storage in the last decade. That’s because many have held to the outdated idea that while object storage could offer advantages in scale, it lacked the performance capability for higher-performance applications.
But that’s no longer the case. Today’s object storage can provide very high levels of throughput (fast delivery of data per second), whether in the cloud or on-premises, especially as new object storage solutions leverage flash media. For a wide range of applications managing unstructured data, object storage is in fact their primary storage solution.
Data Point No. 5: Big Data needs new management
As the volume, variety and velocity of data continue to increase, it will soon become unmanageable using traditional methods. That includes spreading all the data across multiple clouds, creating storage tiers in silos. The volume of data and the number of places you keep it result in two dimensions of unmanageability.
Data Point No. 6: Fast object storage means better management
Rather than holding data in silos, a better approach is to use a single tier of storage that is fast enough to be considered the main tier for (at least) 80% of your data. Object storage can now offer this: a single tier that is fast enough, big enough and cost-effective enough to hold everything.
The time for long-term business solutions has come, and the short-term cloud strategies of 2020 must be transitioned to meet long-term needs. More apps mean more data, which means more storage. For a solution that makes that data accessible in a budget-friendly way, fast object storage offers clear advantages.
About the Author:
Paul is CPO at Scality. He is an expert in Cloud Computing, Object Storage, NAS & file systems, data management and database technologies.