We have reached a point where enterprises, SME and even start-up do not have the choice of either go all cloud or stay on-prem, if the objective is to take advantage of what the cloud can provide while keeping the company competitive and comply to the internal and external regulatory requirement.
Hybrid cloud is the best solution for now, where IT organization can look at the applications, services and data they are managing and place them at the most logical location to reduce cost, improve performance, efficiency and agility.
Hybrid cloud means the IT infrastructure managed by the organization will span between private cloud and public cloud, or multiple public clouds. Type of workload at which cloud will be entirely depends on the kind of applications, the data confidentiality concern and the users of the application and data. One important criterion is that the IT will be able to effectively manage, deploy, tear down, secure, migrate those workload easily between clouds.
What are the services available from hybrid cloud offering?
One of the first few services that is the low hanging fruit that an IT organization can immediately benefit from are the backup, archive, and disaster recovery services. Most of the organization will consider those services not adding value to the business, cost too much resources, in term of money and human time spent, and usually very low priority until something bad happen, such as accidently deletion of critical data, attack by malware and forced to pay ransom to recover, and datacentre failure due to many external reasons. Chart below from ESG agree with our finding that between 36% to 46% of company surveyed will use cloud for backup/recovery/archive/DR services.
What are the services available from AVM Cloud?
In June 2019, AVM cloud introduces 4th category of cloud services, on top of the existing VPC, dedicated cloud and our own on-prem private cloud solution called cloud-in-a-box.
The new category is named Fusion. There are currently 3 different services under this category, they are as follow:
- Fusion Backup & Recovery Services
- Fusion Disaster Recovery Services
- Fusion Office 365 Data Protection Services
For Fusion Backup and Recovery Services, customer can modernize their backup infrastructure, reducing the on-prem cost of keeping long term backup copies, most probably with expensive and un-reliable tape, and make use of the lower cost storage services in the cloud for the storage. AVM Cloud can provide best in class backup recovery software in a pre-installed and managed appliance on-prem in customer environment to perform the backup and storing the most recent backups for quick recovery, while transferring the older backups via secured and encrypted cloud connection to AVM cloud for storage. Customer have the access to the backup software console and able to perform recovery on their own or engage AVM cloud to execute the recovery.
As for Fusion Disaster Recovery Services, customer can subscribe to this service to enable their IT infrastructure to be available in the event of a disaster, such as data center outages, prolong utility failure, network disruption and many more other scenario. Selected mission and business critical data will be replicated to AVM cloud via this service daily in preparation to be promoted to production when customer declare a disaster. AVM Cloud can also provide physical workspaces for customer IT and operation personnel to perform their support task in the event of the disaster, the work space include office space and network connectivity.
The final new services under Fusion is the Office365 data protection. Common misunderstanding from the customer when they migrate their email, collaboration and file services to Office365 is that the data will be protected in the event of accidental deletion or retrieval of data after it was being deleted. In Microsoft Office365 shared responsibility model, the data is the responsibility of the customer and they need to implement their own data protection and data retention. Especially when one user left the organization, if the O365 administrator remove the user, his/her data will be deleted from the services, sometimes, it is important to keep the data for reference or even for audit and investigation. This service will cover the data in email, sharepoint and one drive.
For more detail, please contact AVM cloud sales team or cloud product team.
What other services can you expect from the pipeline?
Other than the services mentioned above, there are some really interesting development on hybrid cloud, or even multi-cloud data management solution available in the market, which AVM cloud is going to add them into our service catalogue.
NetApp, a leading data management company and a partner of AVM cloud, have a great solution to provide a single platform of data services that span across on-prem private cloud with other popular cloud service provider such as AWS, Azure, GCP, AVM cloud and more. With NetApp CVO (Cloud Volume ONTAP), customer on-prem storage and AVM cloud’s ONTAP infrastructure, customer can easily deploy, move and replicate their data anywhere within the infrastructure by simply drag-and-drop the workload using a single SaaS (Software As A Service) based management tools called NetApp Cloud Manager. Watch this space or contact the sales and cloud product team for a preview.
