Jay Livens: You talked a lot about workloads and moving them between clouds. But one of the questions we often hear is, how do you get your workloads to the clouds, what are the common challenges going from on-premises to the clouds that you can take advantage of those cloud economics and flexibility you refer to?
Ashok: Absolutely, right. And the other aspect to talk about is, there is so much information about cloud that people are easily confused. “What do I use, do I use block, do I use object, do I use platform as a service?” All of these terminologies are coming at us. And so from an IT provider perspective, if I’ve just been running my IT and my datacenter, this is overwhelming, right, what do I adopt, right? And how do I know what my cosmetic is going to look like? And the only way I know like it’s traditionally done as common practice is to experiment, right. You try something out and say, “No, that doesn’t work for me,” you try something else. So you want to leverage the utility that lets you try multiple things at the same time.
So for instance, can I use, for my Oracle data sets or SAP data sets, which is crown jewels, I want to able to recover them in 15 minutes, can I leverage the fastest SSD on Google? And if I want to keep data for seven years for a long term data retention, can I leverage Azure blob or AWS S3 or S3 Infrequent Access, and can I do mix and match, because I want to go back to both worlds, right?
So you want a utility that will let you move between different storage tiers across different cloud platforms, and then let’s you pick what this is going to look like. So you want to able to look at your TCO, plan for the future, and then plan your budget accordingly.
That is something that a lot of providers are talking about backup and recovery. So one of the things that we talk to CIOs and VPs and architects that are looking at the cloud, we say, “Okay, you want to have a budget, you want to have an approach, and then basically check off a number of things:
- Is this meeting your performance?
- Is it blowing your budget in terms of network bandwidth, the amount of compute locally?
- Are you truly saving money economically?”
All of these have to make sense before you leverage the cloud strategy. That’s how we see it and advise customers.
Previous conversation: Ways to Save Money with Multicloud
Learn more: Webinar: Migrating On-Premises Databases to the Cloud
Tip Sheet: 9 Must Haves for Cloud Backup and Recovery