How To Break Down Public Cloud Silos

Many companies are moving their data and applications to the cloud. And more and more companies are striving for a multi-cloud strategy. There are many reasons companies do this. Perhaps they fear vendor lock-in — where they have put so much of their company’s workloads and applications into one particular cloud, that they aren’t able to take advantage of competitive pricing. Or maybe they are trying to leverage the unique feature/functionalities each of the various cloud vendors offer for certain workloads that will benefit the most from them. They might even be different teams in different departments who happened to choose to host their data on this or that cloud because of team member or customer preference or experience. Or perhaps they are leveraging multi-cloud Disaster Recovery for high-availability purposes.

How a Multi-Cloud Strategy Leads to Cloud Silos

Whatever the reason, the use of different cloud infrastructure – coupled with any remaining on-prem datacenters – creates a multi-cloud environment. And while the term “multi-cloud” conjures the image of data housed on different cloud infrastructures coming together comprehensively…. this often is very far from reality.

There are multiple ways to migrate your data into the cloud. The cloud vendors, like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, recommend using DBaaS as it offers the best ease-of-use. However, moving databases from on-prem to DBaaS/PaaS can be a lengthy, intensive, and risky process. And as each cloud vendor offers different DBaaS/PaaS solutions for databases, this can make it more difficult to switch platforms. This applies to born-in-the-cloud workloads as well: you won’t want to embark on the refactoring process if your workloads are already entrenched with another cloud vendor.

The result? All of your public clouds are severely siloed.

These siloes can seriously impact the business. Without a clear view into where data is residing, you could be paying to house data in different clouds. There is serious concern for business continuity if your DR is on multiple clouds. It can also have major financial implications, such as paying for duplicate data and workloads on multiple cloud infrastructures. Or not seeing where other costs can be quickly and easily trimmed. And if your DR is on multiple clouds, it can be difficult to quickly pull everything into production quickly and keep the business up and running in case of disaster. Not only that, but if data is siloed, it can be hard to get the most value and make the most sense out of data since you don’t have a full picture of what is available.

Getting out of Cloud Silos

So what is a siloed business to do?

Having a common data platform across your multi-cloud is instrumental in breaking down data silos. This platform should make it possible to decouple your workloads, databases, and applications from the underlying infrastructure. This would allow for data to quickly and easily be moved from one cloud to another, while avoiding the need to refactor your databases and workloads for each particular cloud vendor.

Introducing Silk

The Silk Cloud Data Virtualization Platform offers enterprises the perfect solution to their public cloud silos. The platform resides between customers’ databases and the underlying cloud infrastructure. This makes it easy for customers to lift and shift data between cloud vendors without the hassle and stress of refactoring.

In addition, Silk offers ultra-fast performance that can’t be achieved through native cloud alone. This makes the Silk Platform ideal for customers who are looking to move their most complex mission-critical databases and workloads to the cloud. On average, Silk customers see up to 10x faster performance on the cloud.

Silk leverages enterprise data services such as data reduction, thin provisioning, and zero-footprint clones that help to reduce the amount of cloud resources that are being used. If you are working in a dev/test environment, you can take as many snapshots as you like without fear of blowing through your cloud budget. The result of this is that Silk customers save up to 30% on their cloud bills.

Ready to start breaking down the data silos that are keeping your multi-cloud from reaching its full potential? Contact us today to get a demo of the Silk Platform from one of our cloud experts.