“The migration to
Cloud can lead to fragmented, siloed data infrastructures, ironically
intensifying the very challenges which organisations invested time and
resources to mitigate. A unified platform to manage all aspects of cloud usage can prevent the fog of virtualisation endured by so many.”
Paul Hearns, Editor, TechPro magazine |
The Burning Question
TechFire 10, on successive days in Dublin and Cork at the end of April 2014, addressed one of the biggest Burning Questions in current IT practice: Can you manage all your clouds from one platform? Organisations deploying cloud without foresight often find themselves tangled in fragmented, confusing and heavily siloed data infrastructures. Rather than move their data into the cloud, they realise that they have pushed it onto several disjointed clouds, ironically intensifying the very challenges they have invested so much time and resources to mitigate. A new approach is the “unbound cloud” where an aligned, flexible, hybrid architecture allows IT to leverage its role as broker of services to full strategic advantage. Some infrastructures are developed and managed on the premises, some are outsourced to a service provider and some are rented from a hyperscaler, such as Amazon or Microsoft. Moving any workload to the public cloud involves careful planning and migration. Achieving portability of workloads across public clouds along with the ability to bring workloads back in-house are also of paramount importance. The unbound cloud empowers the best choice of IT environment for the business process, without compromising security, policy management, data protection, availability or consistency. For IT today, this consistency without compromise is critical. The lack of a long-term strategy and architecture leads to the creation of fragmented and chaotic data environments that can be difficult — and costly — to unravel. NetApp, together with partner Cisco, outlined how the unbound cloud can take organisations safely into the new era of unbound cloud. |
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