Multi-Cloud and Data Lake

Data Lake Multicloud

Improve data value and cloud efficiency

Multi-cloud is everywhere

Most enterprises use multi-cloud services to host business applications and data, the most valuable digital asset. About 92% of organizations have multi-cloud environments.1 All organizations strive to operate more effectively and capitalize on new technologies to build a competitive advantage. As multi-cloud footprints grow, data also increases, making it harder for apps scattered across several clouds to interact with siloed data. Having more options, while good, often introduces complexities that diminish the value of the solution. Multi-cloud is no exception.

Multi-cloud growing pains

The adoption of multi-cloud delivers significant business benefits but also introduces challenges such as:

  • Higher costs. Contrary to expectations, cloud adoption can result in higher costs when it lacks proper management. Enterprises estimate that they spend 65% of IT resources on running the business and only 36% on business growth initiatives.2
  • Siloed data. Rising data volumes and the increasing significance of business data analytics make unifying data accessible to all apps a critical business requirement. Unfortunately, 49% of enterprises silo workloads by the cloud and only 45% integrate data between the cloud and other deployments.3
  • Multi-cloud management. Managing dynamic and heterogeneous environments requires tools and apps designed to work across clouds and address interoperability concerns. While 84% of enterprises stress the importance of consistent management across hybrid and multi-cloud,4 only 42% of companies use multi-cloud management tools.5
  • Security and compliance. Data protection remains the top priority of organizations. 98% of them feel that relying on multiple cloud providers compounds security challenges.6

Data lakes streamline data availability

A data lake is a central repository where companies can store, process and analyze data. By unifying data under a single infrastructure accessible from all deployments, organizations can alleviate the complexities of multi-cloud and gain significant business benefits, including:

  1. Consistent management. Adopting a data lake enables customers to establish uniform rules and governance for all cloud and on-premises apps. Simplified management shared APIs reduce IT overhead and streamline the performance of management applications. By 2025, 49% of data will be held in public clouds, with cloud service providers managing 51% of stored data.7
  2. VM and container support. A data lake offers a unified data plane for supporting apps deployed in virtual machines (VMs) and microservices residing in containers. The single control plane approach simplifies deployments and management.
  3. Enhanced resilience. There is one storage space with a data lake to scale, backup, protect, accelerate disaster recovery and ensure high availability.
  4. Improved performance. Unified data storage allows for deploying high-speed infrastructure with minimal latency, jitter and packet loss introduced by hopping between networks and servers in multiple locations.
  5. No egress costs. Customers can avoid egress charges by utilizing a data lake accessible from multiple clouds and on-premises apps.
  6. No vendor lock-in. With a data lake, the idea of vendor lock-in goes out the window. By keeping data on a shared data lake infrastructure, customers free data from dependence on any specific cloud.
  7. Continuous compliance. Data lakes simplify the analytics of data and ensure that compliance with regulatory requirements is maintained. That task would be many times more complicated with data scattered across multiple clouds and providers.

Simplify and thrive

Managing multi-cloud deployments boils down to the data. Siloed data scattered across many clouds is harder to manage, secure and analyze. A unified data lake infrastructure simplifies management, improves access to data by all apps and users, protects all the data and makes it available to analytics apps. Data lakes also make it easier to maintain high availability with better performance and verifiable regulatory compliance. Organizations can get more from their data when it is available, properly managed, protected and kept in compliance.

  1. 1, 2, 3, 5. Flexera 2021. “Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report.”
  2. 4. IDC January 2021. “Strategies for Building Infrastructure Resiliency: Global Survey Results.”
  3. 6. Help Net security July 2021. “Multi-cloud environments creating additional security challenges.”
  4. 7. Seagate 2020. “Rethink Data.”