Intelligent CIO North America Issue 55 | Page 76

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What tools or frameworks are emerging to automate routine processes in hybrid cloud management and how do they impact operational efficiency ?
Many organizations are using hybrid cloud strategies to get elastic burst capacity in the cloud and optimize infrastructure costs . In both of these cases , organizations need an efficient way to mobilize data across their datacenters and the cloud . Since there are many tiers of performance and cost for storage in the cloud , especially for file and object data , it is important to have a systematic and efficient way to migrate and tier petabytes of unstructured data to maximize performance while minimizing costs . Data management solutions now exist that leverage analytics to intelligently handle all the thorny issues of migrating and tiering data – from moving billions of small files , dealing with spotty network availability , requirements for chain of custody reporting , or you want the fastest way to parallelize migrating petabytes of data . Also , storage independent data management solutions let you transparently tier data across file and object architectures so your users continue to access data from its original location even when the data may be residing on a cloud object storage such as Azure Blob Archive or Amazon S3 Glacier , which are over 20 times less expensive .
How can IT teams avoid vendor lockin while maintaining flexibility and optimizing their cloud infrastructure ?
For a large enterprise , vendor lock-in can be a tough one to solve if your organization has been entrenched with a few key vendors for many years . Big vendors can offer you great deals to continue doing a lot of business with them – but in the long term this is not a smart strategy because of the pace of technological change . Let ’ s take data storage , for instance . There is continual innovation with faster , more efficient , AI-ready storage platforms on-premises and in the cloud . You don ’ t want to be committed and unable to easily change your
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