No surprise, business is going to the cloud. Forbes cites recent 451 research predicting that “Within two years, 34% of enterprises will have 60% or more of their applications on a cloud platform and 47% of marketing departments will have 60% or more of their applications on a cloud platform.” But to achieve true cloud-based IT, data and storage are still the last frontier. Enterprises want to put data and applications in the cloud but still need to flexibly control, move and manage their data. The revelation for many comes in the moment they understand that their storage solution no longer comes from acquiring another box. The solution requires a dual application and data focus. The challenge is finding how to bind their data and applications and reliably manage all at scale.
Even spending $46B annually, organizations continue to be frustrated in the attempt to control and efficiently manage data lifecycles. It’s not just the cost. It’s speed of data access. It’s the complexity of managing, protecting and securing that data in and out of, to and from the cloud, while responding to business priorities and technology changes. It’s gaining control of ballooning data copies. These are not new problems, but they are ever more pressing because they obstruct every organization’s progress to flexible cloud models – to a truly virtualized data environment.
Infrastructure-Centric to Data-Centric
Actifio has bulldozed the accepted model of infrastructure-centric data management. Traditional storage vendors don’t like that. That’s because the established storage businesses were built to sell storage boxes. In that process, vendors created a long tail of infrastructure, profitable for them, restrictive and expensive for their clients. Cloud changes that. Enterprises are rethinking their IT strategies. Getting past traditional thinking. We’re all prisoners of our experience, and it has taken some time to forget about the box and focus on how to bind data with the application – because then it doesn’t matter where information lives.
Because their thinking had always been “we need to get the data in here – in the box,” conventional storage vendors have viewed the box as the center of gravity. Even when they mask the boxes of multiple vendors to seem like a single box, the data is still tied to a box. The Actifio design point is, quite literally, to think outside the box.
The Smart Data Advantage
Actifio changes the center of gravity from the storage box to application data, creating smart virtualized data. That means holding the data with its reservoir of metadata to make data very, very smart. In effect, the data knows where it originated. It knows which application, at what time, at what level of protection and what authorized access. It’s smart data. It ties directly to SLAs that direct what needs to happen throughout its lifecycle. It’s a unique approach that can scale to billions of objects, each with very precise associated service levels.
The bonus of smart data is much more than movement. It’s time.
Businesses can accelerate the advantages of cloud models for rapid time-to-value, time-to-insight, time-to-market. Smart data means streamlined and demonstrable data agility through real-time access regardless of location. Simultaneous requirements are satisfied in support of application development, test, backup, disaster recovery, analytics, archive and more.
A single virtualized data copy can now serve these multiple needs with near-instantaneous availability. Virtual data is mobile and free of infrastructure constraints. It moves quickly to and from the cloud wherever and whenever required. It can move seamlessly between data centers, among field locations and to individual users at the edge.
All of this pushes us past data management based on old in-the-box constraints. It’s an end to “the way we’ve always done it.
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