How to Overcome the Complexity of Siloed Multi-Cloud Data
During the past two years, the adoption of multi-cloud computing has accelerated dramatically. As businesses continue to adapt to remote and hybrid workforces, digital transformation continues. Two significant trends have come to the forefront:
- Embracing multi-cloud
- AI/ML data analytics
When Amazon Web Service (AWS) suffered its third outage in a month, millions of people and thousands of businesses were disrupted. Slack chat rooms, gaming, Ring doorbells, even Roomba vacuums, and automated cat feeders stopped working. It was a wake-up call for enterprises relying on a single cloud service provider (CSP).
The challenge, however, is that by spreading data across multiple clouds, it is easy for data to become siloed. If you’re not careful about how you set up your data strategy and cloud infrastructure, it can result in significant costs in moving data back and forth and, worse yet, limited visibility and inaccurate or out-of-sync data.
What Is the State of Multi-Cloud Data?
What is multi-cloud? Multi-cloud is the use of more than one cloud service, either public cloud services or private cloud services, but it’s about more than just multiple clouds. A multi-cloud strategy lets you access cloud services from multiple providers at the same time and provides multiple benefits, including:
- Avoid vendor lock-in
- Mitigate risks from outages
- Expand business into new geographies
- Optimize workloads
- Access best innovation apps
- Utilize strengths of individual cloud services
Multi-cloud data services can also help you defy data gravity, avoid storing duplicate, multiple copies of the same data, or cause data to become out of sync.
Multi-cloud trends include enterprises embracing multiple CSPs to protect their business and using a mix of multi-cloud vs hybrid cloud options. The 2022 State of the Cloud Report shows that 89% of companies surveyed are using multi-cloud strategies. Fully 80% of businesses are also using a hybrid cloud mix of public and private internet.
For most businesses, data access and cost control continue to be their top challenges. Companies reported that their cloud spend was an average of 13% over budget while predicting their cloud spending will increase nearly 30% over the next year.
That’s why it’s so important to work with companies with deep domain expertise, like Faction. As the only true multi-cloud data services provider in the world, Faction makes it possible to reduce your overall storage costs by 3X to 4X.
With cloud volumes, you get persistent, cloud-attached storage that makes your enterprise data available where and when you need it while protecting against data loss. Faction Cloud Control Volumes (CCV) connects seamlessly to all major public cloud providers, including:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Faction Multi-cloud Data Services ensures that data is accessible from multiple clouds at the same time without increasing latency and negatively impacting performance. This also helps avoid vendor lock and minimize egress fees.
How Do Organizations Benefit From Unified Data Within Their Multi-Cloud Solution?
The amount of data being collected and stored is staggering, and it’s growing at a rate of 38% every year. Every day, your organization accumulates more data than it had yesterday, but there’s a significant problem. Only 10% of the data most organizations have is unique. The other 90% is replicated and most often siloed data.
That’s an expensive problem. Besides the storage costs and challenges in accessing and using the right data sets, siloed data can quickly get out of sync and lead to poor analysis and misguided business decisions.
What you need is one universal source of truth that is always 100% up to date and isn’t replicated across your multi-cloud environment.
When you deploy a third-party cloud data warehouse on Faction’s cloud data service platform, that’s exactly what you get: a single source of truth and a single copy of your data in a centralized data store. It eliminates the need to ingest data into the public cloud every time. It also simplifies and optimizes your data analysis by allowing on-demand cloud services from multiple public clouds simultaneously.
A unified data solution reduces your cloud storage footprint, costs and egress fees, avoids vendor lock-in, and simplifies workflows. Data is available to all clouds, so you can accelerate analysis with on-demand cloud provisioning as you need it.
- No more siloed data
- Lower costs
- Simplified workflows
That’s what you get with Faction.
Steps to Overcome the Complexities of Siloed Multi-Cloud Data
In a multi-cloud environment, traditional architecture means storing data and applications together. If you want to use the data with another cloud provider, you’ve got to replicate the data or move it. Every time you move data back and forth, there’s a cost. If you keep duplicate sets, you will incur higher costs and may not always know if the data is up to date.
It’s also highly inefficient.
Each CSP has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you need raw processing speed, you may choose one CSP over another. The same applies to data scientists doing data analytics using AI, machine learning, deep learning, or Big Data analysis. Some platforms perform better than others. However, if your data’s not already there, it adds to the complexity (and cost).
When you create a unified data strategy and separate data and applications, you eliminate the complexity of data architecture. Data lives in one place, and you can choose different cloud providers for the best fit without adding to the costs or needing to replicate your data.
To achieve greater efficiency, you’ll want to make sure you deploy a pristine integration process and work with the experts at Faction to make everything simpler and interoperable. You’ll also want to adopt these best practices.
Adopt a unified data strategy
Organizations need to adopt a unified data strategy, and that is likely to mean a culture change. As companies have added on to legacy cloud storage, applications, and vendor solutions, cloud infrastructure can become quite complex. Data ends up in departmental silos or spreads across cloud environments from different vendors.
To break down silos, you need a change in the way you approach data storage.
Separate Data and Applications to Allow Independent Storage Growth
By separating data from the application layer, you can reduce your overall amount of storage and egress costs without sacrificing your data access in your multi-cloud deployment. Data lives in an independent layer that is accessible through any of your cloud resources.
This also reduces data gravity. Data gravity occurs when data sets grow and applications are located near the ever-expanding data pools. Over time, these assets continue to grow larger and larger, pulling more data into their “gravitational pull.” It makes it increasingly difficult to move. It can easily lock you into a single cloud or a single cloud service provider.. The best practice is to separate data from applications, making data simultaneously accessible by all apps on any cloud.
Build One Data Repository With a Single Copy of Your Data
Conventional multi-cloud architecture typically includes copying and moving data to each new cloud. This diminishes cloud-computing cost efficiency and increases complexity. It can also isolate data that could quickly become out of sync.
When you have a single copy of your data, there’s no need for duplicate copies. This approach eliminates data silos and the need to replicate data or pull it locally for analysis. With a single source of truth, users have the same view of data and know they are always working with the most current data.
Having a single data copy also simplifies data governance and compliance, which is particularly crucial when you are storing sensitive customer data or Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as in the regulated industries including Financial Services, the FinTech industry, or when managing multiple healthcare data storage options.
Make All Data Simultaneously Available to Authorized Users and Apps on All Clouds
With Faction, you get simultaneous multi-cloud access for any authorized user. Without having to move, copy, or replicate data, you can use best-of-breed cloud services at whichever cloud service is the best fit for your application. Democratizing data enhances employees’ productivity.
Since Faction frees your data, you get the ultimate flexibility and control as to how you process, manage and govern the data. You can spin up an AWS instance or change your computer resource to Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, or MS Azure without ever having to move data.
Working With a Trusted Industry Expert
The idea behind unifying your data is simple, but the execution can be complex. Mistakes in implementation can be risky and costly. Avoid undertaking data unification projects on your own. When you utilize the services of the qualified experts at Faction with deep domain knowledge in your industry, you will get the job done right.
Faction simplifies data infrastructure by breaking down data silos and cloud silos to unify all data into a single copy of an organization’s data set. The unified data set is easier to protect, back up, and restore. Faction also makes all of an organization’s data available to every authorized user, regardless of the cloud service providers they use.
To access the single data set, users can utilize one IP address and one domain namespace to reach the data. In short, this results in no cloud or data silos. You get a single data set, one source of truth that’s simultaneously accessible from all clouds and available to all authorized users for better business intelligence.
Contact Faction today and unlock the unrealized value of your data. Book an intro call today and learn more about Faction’s patented multi-cloud technologies.
