Cloud Mobility

Collaboration is the leading use case for cloud services today for both consumers and businesses. This is not surprising given the amount of unstructured data created by businesses, machines, and most importantly individuals. How and with what workloads to leverage public cloud is among the top challenges faced by IT executives. Cloud mobility is about balancing resources and costs between private and public cloud services, as well as the flexibility to adapt quickly to changes in markets, technologies or the business itself.

Most organizations are using one or more SaaS services today for applications such as messaging, file sharing, and backup. IT organizations are also evaluating what workloads are or would be best served by running them in compute and/or storage clouds such as Amazon AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure. For organizations already using storage IaaS, the four leading use cases are:

• Storage for compute clouds
• Backup and disaster recovery
• Archiving
• File sharing and serving

However, the use of either a public or private cloud approach is not a unilateral decision and often involves legal and regulatory considerations for both data location and shared vs. dedicated infrastructure. Whether the data must stay on site in the country of origin or elsewhere is a first order priority to discuss. As a result, the solution an organization chooses will need to incorporate strong location-based metadata capabilities that support dedicated and multi-tenancy, and provide the ability to find and access the data that users need regardless of where that data resides.

An effective cloud mobility solution should enable the creation of policies to automatically move authorized data to a choice of private or public clouds. Data should remain encrypted in the cloud and data should be easily and seamlessly recalled onsite as needed, or moved to a different cloud as business demands change.

Ultimately, customers want the ability to choose the cloud delivery model – or models – that best suit their cost, access, security, scalability, and compliance needs. Private, public, and hybrid cloud models can enable organizations to choose the right option for all their data and content, while allowing them to manage, identify, and access the data they need when they need it to support the business. As content, data, and analytics needs grow, various cloud services enable organizations to scale their solutions and to more effectively transform their data into intelligence. An ideal solution must adapt to these changes.