Cloud computing is now a hallmark of all enterprise IT strategies, and public cloud computing has become one of the most transformative factors in the entire enterprise computing landscape. By 2023, global expenditures on public cloud computing will exceed $1.1 trillion by 2023, representing a 6-year compound annual growth rate of nearly 24%.
But that massive investment in public cloud services can only be optimized if organizations have a smart, consistent strategy for ensuring reliable, high-performance connectivity and integration into the public cloud. All too often, in their rush to move workloads to the cloud, enterprises look for a fast, inexpensive approach that results in “technical debt” that may result in challenges such as different data control planes, inconsistent connectivity and spotty application performance.
Wiping out technical debt
In order to wipe out that technical debt in public cloud integration and connectivity due to inefficient processes and poor data organization, enterprises need a system of unified data services formulated by a common data architecture.
This is important because the once-obvious line of distinction between the data center and the cloud has muddied and, more recently, disappeared entirely. This is a good thing, of course, because applications shouldn’t have to discern where the data is or should be, or where it’s connecting too. As enterprises increasingly move to a cloud-first or cloud-native applications development-and-deployment model, connecting into one or more public clouds must take place without latency or fear of dropped connection is essential.
By deploying a standardized data architecture, enterprises take a major step toward connectivity and integrating into the public cloud to and from the core on-prem data center to the edge. This ability to seamlessly connect your business- and mission-critical application data in the public cloud—and, increasingly, in a multi-cloud environment—is paramount.
Build a Standardized Data Architecture
This paper aims to help you understand why your organization should build a standardized data architecture and explains how to get around three of the biggest obstacles to building a standardized data architecture.
Download NowMust-have functions for data management in a cloud-first world
With an organization’s essential applications often sensitive to performance bottlenecks and unacceptable latency, cloud architects and IT decision-makers should adopt a data architecture that enables such capabilities as auto-scaling in order to integrate applications with an ever-increasing array of new cloud services in order to drastically curtail and ultimately eliminate technical debt. This common data architecture substantially eases cloud and data management, because it works the same way from cloud platform to cloud platform, and from on-premises “core” data center to those cloud platforms.
By allowing applications and data structures to work together efficiently and reliably, this new storage architecture facilitates public cloud integration and connectivity regardless of the data’s location. This common data storage architecture also extends the native data architectures of the different public cloud platforms, allowing data to integrate and connect into all those public cloud environments without additional hardware or software expenditures, or hiring expensive data architecture consultants.
Leveraging technical and market leadership with NetApp solutions
NetApp offers a market-proven array of cloud storage services, including a unified data services stack designed to work consistently with all major public cloud platforms. Because NetApp has a long history of working with different data types in the data center, it understands that enterprises want the same consistency of performance and management experience in their cloud environments as they have enjoyed in their data centers.
NetApp’s Cloud Volumes solutions span a wide range of cloud storage services for such popular platforms as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and more. They appeal to a wide range of IT organizations looking for a fully managed file storage service. Its rich line of application programming interfaces enable tight integration of such services as storage configuration, capacity provisioning, storage protocol and data throughput.
NetApp’s ONTAP, the market-leading data management platform, has been integrated into the Cloud Volumes line as a software-only storage subscription service running ONTAP. It is configured as a virtual machine version of the ONTAP data management platform, running on top of public cloud platforms’ compute and storage resources.
As organizations increasingly move toward a public cloud/multi-cloud/hybrid cloud reality, the need to improve integration into and connectivity with all major public cloud platforms becomes more pronounced. Using a common data architecture, such as those developed and deployed by NetApp, is a major step forward.
For more information on NetApp’s common data architecture, please visit https://www.netapp.com/cloud-storage-solutions/data-migration-legacy-apps.
