hybrid cloud migration – 🔴 Red Button Data

Mar 22 2024

Strategies for Midsize Enterprises to Overcome Cloud Adoption Challenges

While moving to the cloud is transformative for businesses, the reality is that midsize enterprise CIOs and CDOs must consider a number of challenges associated with cloud adoption. Here are the three most pressing challenges we hear about – and how you can work to solve them.

Leveraging existing data infrastructure investments
Closing technical skills gap
Cloud cost visibility and control

Recommendations

Innovate with secure hybrid cloud solutions
Choose managed services that align with the technical ability of your data team
Maintain cost control with a more streamlined data stack

Innovate With Secure Hybrid Cloud Solutions

There is no denying that cloud is cheaper in the long run. The elimination of CapExcosts enables CIOs to allocate resources strategically, enhance financial predictability, and align IT spending with business goals. This shift toward OpEx-based models is integral to modernizing IT operations and supporting organizational growth and agility in today’s digital economy.

But migrating all workloads to the cloud in a single step carries inherent risks including potential disruptions. Moreover, companies with strict data sovereignty requirements or regulatory obligations may need to retain certain data on-premises due to legal, security, or privacy considerations. Hybrid cloud mitigates these risks by enabling companies to migrate gradually, validate deployments, and address issues iteratively, without impacting critical business operations. It offers a pragmatic approach for midsize enterprises seeking to migrate to the cloud while leveraging their existing data infrastructure investments.

How Actian Hybrid Data Integration Can Help

The Actian Data Platform combines the benefits of on-premises infrastructure with the scalability and elasticity of the cloud for analytic workloads. Facilitating seamless integration between on-premises data sources and the cloud data warehouse, the platform enables companies to build hybrid cloud data pipelines that span both environments. This integration simplifies data movement, storage and analysis, enabling organizations to extend the lifespan of existing assets and deliver a cohesive, unified and resilient data infrastructure. To learn more read the ebook 8 Key Reasons to Consider a Hybrid Data Integration Solution

Choose Managed Services That Align With the Technical Ability of Your Data Team

Cloud brings an array of new opportunities to the table, but the cloud skills gap remains a problem. High demand means there’s fierce market competition for skilled technical workers. Midsize enterprises across industries and geos are struggling to hire and retain top talent in the areas of cloud architecture, operations, security, and governance, which in turn severely delays their cloud adoption, migration, and maturity. This carries the potential greater risk of falling behind competitors.

Bridging this skills gap requires strategic investments in HR and Learning and Development (L&D), but the long-term solution has to go simply beyond upskilling employees. One such answer is managed services that are typically low- or no-code, thus enabling even non-IT users to automate key BI, reporting, and analytic workloads with proper oversight and accountability. Managed solutions are typically designed to handle large volumes of data and scale seamlessly as data volumes grow—perfect for midsize enterprises. They often leverage distributed processing frameworks and cloud infrastructure to ensure high performance and reliability, even with complex data pipelines.

Actian’s Low-Code Solutions

The Actian Data Platform was built for collaboration and governance midsize enterprises demand. The platform comes with more than 200 fully managed pre-built connectors to popular data sources such as databases, cloud storage, APIs, and applications. These connectors eliminate the need for manual coding to interact with different data systems, speeding up the integration process and reducing the likelihood of errors. The platform also includes built-in tools for data transformation, cleansing, and enrichment. Citizen integrators and business analysts can apply various transformations to the data as it flows through the pipeline, such as filtering, aggregating and cleansing, ensuring data quality and reliability—all without code.

Maintain Cost Control with a More Streamlined Data Stack

Midsize enterprises are rethinking their data landscape to reduce cloud modernization complexity and drive clear accountability for costs across their technology stack. This complexity arises due to various factors, including the need to refactor legacy applications, integrate with existing on-premises systems, manage hybrid cloud environments, address security and compliance requirements, and ensure minimal disruption to business operations.

Point solutions, while helpful for specific problems, can lead to increased operational overhead, reduced data quality, and potential points of failure, increasing the risk of data breaches and regulatory violations. Although the cost of entry is low, the ongoing support, maintenance, and interoperability cost of these solutions are almost always high.

A successful journey to cloud requires organizations to adopt a more holistic approach to data management, with a focus on leveraging data across the entire organization’s ecosystem. Data platforms can simplify data infrastructure, thus enabling organizations to migrate and modernize their data systems faster and more effectively in cloud-native environments all while reducing licensing costs and streamlining maintenance and support.

How Actian’s Unified Platform Can Help

The Actian Data Platform can unlock the full potential of the cloud and offers several advantages over multiple point solutions with its centralized and unified environment for managing all aspects of the data journey from collection through to analysis. The platform reduces the learning curve for users, enabling them to derive greater value from their data assets while reducing complexity, improving governance, and driving efficiency and cost savings.

Getting Started

The best way for data teams to get started is with a free trial of the Actian Data Platform. From there, you can load your own data and explore what’s possible within the platform. Alternatively, book a demo to see how Actian can accelerate your journey to the cloud in a governed, scalable, and price-performant way.

The post Strategies for Midsize Enterprises to Overcome Cloud Adoption Challenges appeared first on Actian.

Data Processing Across Hybrid Environments Is Important, Analysts Say

Would you be surprised to know that by 2026, eight in 10 enterprises will have data spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers? This prediction by Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett is based, at least in part, on the trend of organizations increasingly using more than one cloud service in addition to their on-premises infrastructure.

Optimizing all of this data—regardless of where it lives—requires a modern data platform capable of accessing and managing data in hybrid environments. “As such, there is a growing requirement for cloud-agnostic data platforms, both operational and analytic, that can support data processing across hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments,” Aslett explains.

For many organizations, managing data while ensuring quality in any environment is a struggle. New data sources are constantly emerging and data volumes are growing at unprecedented rates. When you couple this with an increase in the number of data-intensive applications and analysts who need quality data, it’s easy to see why data management is more complex but more necessary than ever before.

As organizations are finding, data management and data quality problems can and will scale—challenges, silos, and inefficient data processes that exist on-premises or in one cloud will compound as you migrate across multiple clouds or hybrid infrastructures. That’s why it’s essential to fix those issues now and implement effective data management strategies that can scale with you.

Replacing Complexity with Simplicity

Ventana research also says that traditional approaches to data processing rely on a complex and often “brittle” architecture. This type of architecture uses a variety of specialized products cobbled together from multiple vendors, which in turn require specialized skill sets to use effectively.

As additional technologies are bolted onto the architecture, processes and data sharing become even more complex. In fact, one problem we see at Actian is that organizations continue to add new data and analytics products into ecosystems that are bogged down with legacy technologies. This creates a complicated tech stack of disparate tools, programming languages, frameworks, and technologies that create barriers to integrating, managing, and sharing data.

For a company to be truly data-driven, data must be easily accessible and trusted by every analyst and data user across the enterprise. Any obstacles to tapping into new data sources or accessing quality data, such as requiring ongoing IT help, encourage data silos, and shadow IT—common problems that can lead to misinformed decision-making and will cause stakeholders to lose confidence in the data.

A modern data platform that makes data easy to access, share, and trust with 100% confidence is needed to encourage data use, automate processes, inform decisions, and feed data-intensive applications. The platform should also deliver high performance and be cost-effective to appeal to everyone from data scientists and analysts who use the data to the CFO who’s focused on the IT budget.

Manageability and Usability Are Critical Platform Capabilities

Today’s data-driven environment demands an easy-to-use cloud data platform. Choosing the best platform to meet your business and IT needs can be tricky. Recognized industry analyst research can help by identifying important platform capabilities and identifying which vendors lead in those categories.

For example, Ventana Research’s “Data Platforms Value Index” is an assessment you can use to evaluate vendors and products. One capability the assessment evaluated is product manageability, which is how well the product can be managed technologically and by the business, and how well it can be governed, secured, licensed, and supported in a service level agreement (SLA).

The assessment also looked at the usability of the product—how well it meets the various business needs of executives, management, workers, analysts, IT, and others. “The importance of usability and the digital experience in software utilization has been increasing and is evident in our market research over the last decade,” the assessment notes. “The requirements to meet a broad set of roles and responsibilities across an organization’s cohorts and personas should be a priority for all vendors.”

The Actian Data Platform ranked second for manageability and third for usability, which reflects the platform’s ease of use by making data easy to connect, manage, and analyze. These key capabilities are must-haves for data-driven companies.

Cut Prep Time While Boosting Data Quality

According to Ventana Research, 69% of organizations cite data prep as consuming the most time in analytics initiatives, followed by reviewing data for quality issues at 64%. This is consistent with what we hear from our customers

This is due to data silos, data quality concerns, IT dependency, data latency, and not knowing the steps to optimize data to intelligently grow the business. Organizations must remove these barriers to go from data to decision with confidence and ease.

The Actian Data Platform’s native data integration capabilities can help. It allows you to easily unify data from different sources to gain a comprehensive and accurate understanding of all data, allowing for better decision-making, analysis, and reporting. The platform supports any source and target data, offers elastic integration and cloud-automated scaling, and provides tools for data integration management in hybrid environments.

You benefit from codeless API and application integration, flexible design capabilities, integration templates, and the ability to customize and re-use integrations. Our integration also includes data profiling capabilities for reliable decision-making and a comprehensive library of pre-built connectors.

The platform is unique in its ability to collect, manage, and analyze data in real-time with its transactional database, data integration, data quality, and data warehouse capabilities. It manages data from any public cloud, multi- or hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments through a single pane of glass. In addition, the platform offers self-service data integration, which lowers costs and addresses multiple use cases, without needing multiple products.

As Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett noted in his analyst perspective, our platform reduces the number of tools and platforms needed to generate data insights. Streamlining tools is essential to making data easy and accessible to all users, at all skill levels. Aslett also says, “I recommend that all organizations that seek to deliver competitive advantage using data should evaluate Actian and explore the potential benefits of unified data platforms.”

At Actian, we agree. That’s why I encourage you to experience the Actian Data Platform for yourself or join us at upcoming industry events to connect with us in person.

The post Data Processing Across Hybrid Environments Is Important, Analysts Say appeared first on Actian.

How to Develop a Multi-Cloud Approach to Data Management

A recent 451 Research survey found that an astonishing 98% of companies are using more than one cloud provider. Two-thirds of organizations use services from 2 or 3 public cloud providers and nearly one third of organizations use four or more providers. Using a multi-cloud strategy involves using the services of multiple cloud providers simultaneously. It’s the dominant data management strategy for most organizations.

Top Multi-Cloud Advantages

There’s a long list of reasons why organizations choose to adopt a multi-cloud approach versus just being tied to a single provider. Here’s a look at some of the top reasons.

You Can Match the Right Cloud to the Right Job

The features and capabilities of cloud vendors vary greatly, so using a multi-cloud approach can let you select the best providers for your specific workload requirements. Differences in services for analytics, machine learning, big data, transactions, enterprise applications, and more are factors to consider when deciding where to run in the cloud. Product integrations, security, compliance, development tools, management tools, and geographic locations unique to a cloud provider may also influence your choice.

You Can Save Money

Pricing between providers can differ significantly. These are just a few examples of what you need to take into account when comparing costs:
Providers price the same services differently
Resources such as compute, memory, storage, and networks have different configurations and pricing tiers
The geographic location of a data center can lead to differences in the cost of cloud provider services
Discounts for reserved instances, spot instances, and committed use can save you dollars depending on your usage patterns
Data transfer costs between regions, data centers, and the internet can add up quickly and you should factor these into your costs
The cost of support services can also impact overall expenses

You Can Enhance Business Continuity

Multi-cloud strategies can enhance business continuity so your cloud processing can resume quickly in the face of disruptions. Below are some aspects of multi-cloud business continuity:
There’s no single point of failure
Geographic redundancy enhances resilience against adverse regional events
Cloud provider diversification mitigates the impact of vendor-specific issues such as a service outage or a security breach. Traffic can be redirected to another provider to avoid service disruption.
Data storage redundancy and backup across clouds can help prevent data loss and data corruption
Redundant network connectivity across multiple clouds can prevent network-related disruptions

You Can Avoid Vendor Lock-In

Using multiple cloud providers prevents organizations from being tied to a single provider. This avoids vendor lock-in, giving organizations more freedom to switch providers or negotiate better terms as needed.

You Can Strengthen Your Compliance

Different cloud providers may offer different compliance certifications and different geographic locations for where data is stored. A choice of options helps improve compliance with industry standards and regulations as well as compliance with data residency and data sovereignty-specific regulations.

Some organizations choose to operate a hybrid cloud environment with capabilities stratified across multiple clouds, private and public. Sensitive data applications may be on a private cloud where an organization has more control over the deployment infrastructure.

Actian in a Multi-Cloud World

Despite these advantages, it’s essential for organizations to carefully plan and manage their multi-cloud data management strategy to ensure seamless integration, efficient resource utilization, and strong security.

The Actian Data Platform is a platform that meets multi-cloud data management requirements with features such as a universal data fabric and built-in data integration tools to process and transform data across clouds. You will also benefit from cloud economics, paying only for what you use, having the ability for the service to shut down or go to sleep after a pre-defined period of inactivity, and scheduling starting, stopping, and scaling the environment to optimize uptime and cost. Security such as data plane network isolation, industry-grade encryption, including at-rest and in-flight, IP allow lists, and modern access controls handle the complexities of multi-cloud security.

The post How to Develop a Multi-Cloud Approach to Data Management appeared first on Actian.

De-Risking The Road to Cloud: 6 Questions to Ask Along the Way

In my career, I’ve had first-hand experience as both a user and a chooser of data analytics technology, and have also had the chance to talk with countless customers about their data analytics journey to the cloud. With some reflection, I’ve distilled the learnings down to 6 key questions that every technology and business leader should ask themselves to avoid pitfalls along the way to the cloud so they can achieve its full promise.

1. What is my use case?

Identifying your starting point is the critical first step of any cloud migration. The most successful cloud migrations within our customer base are associated with a specific use case. This focused approach puts boundaries around the migration, articulates the desired output, and enables you to know what success looks like. Once a single use case has been migrated to the cloud, the next one is easier and often relies on data that has already been moved.

2. How will we scale over time?

Once you’ve identified the use case, you’ll need to determine what scaling looks like for your company. The beauty of the cloud is that it’s limitless in its scalability; however, businesses do have limits. Without planning for scale, businesses run the risk of exceeding resources and timelines.

To scale quickly and maximize value, I always recommend customers evaluate use cases based on level of effort and business value: plotting each use case in a 2×2 matrix will help you identify the low effort, high value areas to focus on. By planning ahead for scale, you de-risk the move to the cloud because you understand what lies ahead.

3. What moves, what doesn’t, and what’s the cost of not planning for a hybrid multi-cloud implementation?

We hear from our customers, especially those in Europe, that there is a need to be deliberate and methodical in selecting the data that moves to the cloud. Despite the availability of data masking, encryption, and other protective measures available, concerns about GDPR and privacy are still very real. These factors need to be considered as the cloud migration roadmap is developed.

Multi-cloud architectures create resiliency, address regulatory requirements, and help avoid the risk of vendor lock-in. The benefits of multi-cloud environments were emphasized in a recent meeting with one of our EMEA-based retail customers. They experienced significant lost revenue and reputation damage after an outage of one of the largest global cloud service providers. The severe impact of this singular outage made them rethink a single cloud strategy and move to multi-cloud as part of their recovery plan.

4. How do I control costs?

In our research on customers’ move to the cloud, we found that half of organizations today are demanding better cost transparency, visibility, and planning capabilities. Businesses want a simple interface or console to determine which workloads are running and which need to be stopped – the easier this is to see and control, the better. Beyond visibility in the control console, our customers also use features such as idle stop, idle sleep, auto-scaling, and warehouse scheduling to manage costs. Every company should evaluate product performance and features carefully to drive the best cost model for the business. In fact, we’ve seen our health insurance customers leverage performance to control costs and increase revenue.

5. What skills gaps will I need to plan for, and how will I address them?

Our customers are battling skills gaps in key areas, including cloud, data engineering, and data science. Fifty percent of organizations lack the cloud skills to migrate effectively to the cloud, and 45 percent of organizations struggle with data integration capacity and challenges, according to our research. Instead of upskilling a team, which can often be a slow and painful process, lean on the technology and take advantage of as-a-service offerings. We’ve seen customers that engage in services agreements take advantage of platform co-management arrangements, fully managed platform services, and outsourcing to help offset skills gap challenges.

6. How will I measure success?

Look beyond cost and measure success based on the performance for the business. Ask yourself: is your cloud solution solving the problem you set out to solve? One of our customers, Met Eireann, the meteorological service for Ireland, determined that query speed was a critical KPI to measure. They found after moving to the cloud that performance improved 60-600 times and reduced query result time down to less than a second. Every customer measures success differently, whether it’s operational KPIs, customer experience, or data monetization. But whatever the measure, make sure you define success early and measure it often.

Making the move to the cloud is a journey, not a single step. Following a deliberate path, guided by these key questions, can help you maximize the value of cloud, while minimizing risk and disruption. With the right technology partner and planning, you can pave a smooth road to the cloud for your organization and realize true business value from your data.

The post De-Risking The Road to Cloud: 6 Questions to Ask Along the Way appeared first on Actian.

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