Four Hybrid Cloud Data Management Challenges
As companies accelerated their digital transformation strategies due to the work-from-home reality of COVID-19, many found the ideal solution in building a hybrid cloud architecture. By capturing the customization of private cloud and the innovation and speed of public cloud, there were ways to maximize the benefits of each type of environment. But even hybrid cloud comes with challenges; specifically, it comes with hybrid cloud data management challenges.
The complexity of a hybrid cloud environment allows enterprises to enjoy its benefits, but that complexity is at the heart of data management challenges. Here are the four most common:
Performance: As data moves around between cloud solutions, it is transported over the internet. This tends to result in slower speeds than if the data were moving around within an in-house legacy solution and adds some latency to the network.
Enterprises solve this challenge a couple of ways: one is to limit the amount of shifting of data between various locations within the architecture. The other option is to use cloud interconnects, which are possible if you have room in your budget, and improve the connection between data centers and the public cloud.
Cost: Data management within the hybrid cloud can become a challenge. It’s best to reduce the impact by compressing data or keeping it from moving between locations, but you can also think strategically about how to process data. For instance, it’s more cost-effective to process data in the cloud that originated in the data center, rather than moving the opposite direction.
Security: There are some aspects of security that are improved by hybrid cloud data management, such as allowing more control over how and where you store your data. But the complexity of hybrid cloud means that you may find it difficult to determine where your data resides and what the access rules should be.
Enterprises often resolve this risk by using infrastructure as code (IaC) templates that are applied in both private and public clouds. Through this approach, your data access policies are centralized on a single platform and used to align practices with compliance and security goals.
Data Redundancy: You may find it more difficult to maintain data redundancy in order to improve availability in a hybrid cloud environment. Data management becomes complicated by trying to configure multiple cloud regions that can mirror your data across your hybrid cloud if your data is not all housed in the public cloud.
One way to address this is to keep all critical data stored in the public cloud for mirroring. You can also try a commercial backup solution that is specifically designed to support hybrid cloud data management, but keep in mind that these solutions can be pricey and add further complexity to your management.If you are looking for solutions to these and more hybrid cloud data management challenges, contact us at ITBroker.com. We can assist you in identifying your most pressing data management priorities as well as the solutions to mitigate them.