What is Data Mobility?
Data mobility is the ability for businesses to access their data from anywhere at any time via the cloud. In the past, business operations were typically confined to a single physical location. The data generated at this location was stored, managed and accessed using on-premises servers.
With business growth, companies expanded to multiple locations around the globe, increasing the necessity for data mobility for employees across these locations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this drive for more remote-friendly working conditions with the ability to access data from anywhere was accelerated. Performance no longer needs to be tied to a physical location. Therefore, businesses pivoted to allow safe access to their company data. This ensures continued high performance and engagement from employees.
Businesses have turned to the cloud to meet the demand for timely access to data. This data and applications are supported by a third-party cloud service provider and can either be public or private depending on business needs and budget. The public cloud offers a low-cost option for cloud computing services while the private cloud provides greater security to manage sensitive data such as health and financial records on the cloud, but at a higher cost.
To take advantage of both worlds, businesses have adopted a hybrid or multi cloud model. In this way, the information that organizations need can be easily accessed and shared despite the fact that they are on disparate cloud infrastructures.
Migrating your company’s data to the cloud has its challenges. You may need to refactor or rewrite your specialized applications to be compatible with the cloud of choice. This is a time intensive effort that has the potential to lock you into a single cloud service provider. Also, your cloud bill costs may balloon out of control if you don’t effectively manage your data on the cloud. Making copies of your data is essential for disaster recovery and quick failover, in case of unexpected interruptions to your cloud service. However, each backup copy you create takes up space on the cloud. On the cloud, every byte counts.
Data Mobility FAQs
What are the advantages of Data Mobility?
Data mobility gives people real-time access to the data that they need to perform their jobs, without confining them to a certain place or requiring them to physically be on site to access data essential to their role. They can access their data using virtually any device, from anywhere.
Data mobility prevents businesses from being locked in by a single cloud service vendor. As you continue to grow, data mobility frees you up to seek and invest in other cloud service platforms with features that better align with your business goals.
What are the potential drawbacks of Data Mobility?
Greater mobility of data means potentially greater risk from cyber-attacks. Data can be moved to an infrastructure that is less secure or more vulnerable to an attack. This can lead to data being compromised or lost all together. Your company’s reputation may never recover from a cyber-attack or data breach. Building back your reputation takes time, ultimately affecting your bottom line. You should develop a prudent cloud strategy that addresses these security risks as part of your business development goals.
IT Departments place limits on who can access company data and from where. This is done to protect the company’s data from a security breach. Restricting access to company data is especially true for the private sector, where your data gives you a competitive advantage.
However, these limitations to data access have forced employees to use devices that have not been vetted by IT. Hooking up non-approved devices to a company’s central data repository carries great risk. Restricting access to data, however, can create data silos within your company where people are locked out of data from other departments. Alternatively, companies can use the fluidity of the cloud to allow their employees to access data from anywhere, but in a controlled way.
Over the years, cloud data security has continued to improve significantly. Now, you can focus on expanding access to your company’s data across a hybrid or multi cloud, while addressing data security concerns.
Silk Optimizes Data Mobility
Silk helps you to effectively manage your cloud resources across a hybrid or multi cloud environment. The Silk Cloud Platform is a virtualization layer that lives between your workloads and the underlying cloud infrastructure. Therefore, it is easy to lift and shift data from one cloud to another or from on-premises to the cloud. Your data is no longer confined to a single cloud service provider. With Silk, you can realize the full potential of your data with the ability to readily move your data as your organization grows.
In addition, Silk offers a range of enterprise data services including zero-footprint snapshots, deduplication, and thin provisioning. This reduces the amount of cloud resources that you need to a minimum. In turn, this helps to minimize your cloud services bill since you no longer need to worry about too many snapshots ballooning through your allocated resources.
Silk is always-on and available, so you never need to worry about not having access to your data in the cloud.