Why use three clouds?

It’s common knowledge that most enterprises want to accelerate their business by leveraging cloud asap. But why would somebody want to use all three major public clouds: Azure, AWS, and Oracle? We have customers today who are using all three of  these clouds for on-demand Test Dev & DR. But not a single customer is using more than one cloud ….. until I talked to a new customer of ours who wants to use all three clouds. So let me highlight their requirements and how Actifio helps them.

Customer requirements & Actifio’s role:

1. Reduce their data center footprint by leveraging cloud for test dev, DR, and long term data retention.
   1. Actifio: Helps solve all three use cases with its data virtualization platform
2. Use Azure for dev test of all apps using MS SQL databases.
   1. Actifio: Replicates data from on premises Actifio Sky to Sky in D5_V2 compute instance in Azure. Provision up to 20 virtual databases instantly for test dev teams without consuming any extra storage.
   2. Actifio: Use the same data in Azure for instant Recovery for their multi TB MS SQL Database.
3. Use AWS for on-demand data warehousing using Amazon Redshift
   1. Actifio: Replicates Oracle data from on premises Actifio Sky to AWS S3 IAS. This solves 10 year retention needs for yearly backups.
   2. Actifio: Once a month, instant mount from object storage to EC2 compute and feed the data to AWS Redshift for data warehousing
4. Use Oracle cloud for test dev and DR of their apps using oracle databases. They picked Oracle cloud specifically because Oracle offers Private cloud deployment.
   1. Actifio: Replicates from on premises Actifio Sky to Actifio Sky running in OC7 compute in Oracle cloud. Use this data for instant recovery for DR as well as to provision upto 10 virtual copies for test dev
5. Manage data, backup, replication policies across their on premises data center, Azure, AWS, Oracle from a single pane of glass
   1. Actifio: Actifio Global Manager is that single pane of glass that manages Actifio Sky instances, SLAs, backup, replication etc across all these clouds seamlessly. The ability for IT to control what resources to use in which cloud for what use cases from a single pane of glass, and yet deliver speed self service to developers and testers is what the customer liked the most.

The customer’s cloud strategy is very impressive because they are adopting cloud for speed and agility, and yet not impacting production apps. Once they get the feel of cloud by actually running copies of their production apps for various use cases such as test dev, DR, DR testing, they can then decide which production apps can go to cloud and which stay on premises.

We at Actifio are also glad that we took a strategy of staying cloud neutral and work with whatever cloud customers pick so they can have the flexibility their business requires. We don’t want to see any of our customers trade infrastructure with one vendor to cloud lock in with one vendor. From a technology standpoint, we believe that the breadth of use cases such as Test Dev, Backup, DR, Vaulting on so many clouds would have been impossible if not for our patented data virtualization technology, as shown in picture below.

Have questions? Send an email to info@actifio.com