Cloud data management

What is Cloud Data Management?

Cloud data management is a way of managing all data that an enterprise has stored, either in the cloud—or multiple clouds—or on-premises using a cloud-based solution.

An effective cloud-based data management solution can have the same capabilities as a modern on-prem data management solution such as data backup, disaster recovery, archiving, file and object services, and analytics. Some data management in cloud vendors even offer protection against ransomware.

A big difference, however, is that cloud data management software is designed to be cloud native to take advantage of underlying cloud services such as cloud storage and is also designed to address special cloud practices around data integrity and security, among other requirements. Organizations taking advantage of cloud data management may use a service provider for as a service (aaS) solutions or self-manage data management services in public or hybrid cloud.

Why is Cloud Data Management Important?

Data is essential to today’s businesses, but effectively managing it can be challenging. The combined effects of mass data fragmentation and the growing complexity of hybrid cloud infrastructures make it all but impossible to control and harness the full value of data with legacy tools.

A cloud-native data management software solution eliminates silos, simplifies operations, and allows you to extract value from a centralized point for a hybrid environment under granular control.

Cloud data management is an extremely attractive proposition for any business operating in a cloud or hybrid environment. The three main benefits from using data management in the cloud are:

• Agility – Because the cloud data management vendor manages and automates many aspects of managing your data—such as data encryption and backups—you can focus your attention on more important, strategic matters. If you are self-managing the cloud software, there may be more pieces to manage, but the speed in which you can deliver services still boosts agility.
• Scalability – The cloud lets you scale data management services up or down as needed, with virtually no limits.
• Cost savings – By moving to on-demand cloud resources, your capital costs evaporate. Your operational costs also go down as you no longer need personnel, energy, and space to support an on-prem system. Finally, you don’t overprovision to account for potential expansion—you operate on a pay-as-you-grow model.

Leading cloud data management software solutions will deliver these capabilities and more:

• Visibility – View of all your cloud data, how it’s being used, and how much it’s costing you.
• Planning and forecasting – Set policies for how data should get moved either from one cloud storage class to another or from an on-prem capacity to the cloud, or to another cloud.
• Comprehensive data management use cases – Gain efficiency and consolidate a variety of use cases including backup, disaster recovery, file and object services, dev/test, and more, helping to remove the complexities of managing multiple data silos.
• Fast and secure cloud data migration – Easily migrate on-prem data to the cloud over a secure connection. Handle permissions and access controls and preserve security of data both while moving data and when it’s at rest in the cloud.

How to use Cloud Data Management?

Cloud data management empowers you and your organization to focus on managing data not infrastructure. Organizations can opt to subscribe to discrete data management offerings addressing a wide range of use cases from one or more providers, or run cloud data management software on public or hybrid cloud.

Here are the ten most popular cloud data use cases:

• Offsite backup and recovery or BaaS
• SaaS and cloud apps protection
• Disaster recovery (DR)
• Air-gap security and ransomware recovery
• Compliance and data governance
• Long-term retention and archiving
• Files and objects
• Development and test
• Cloud data lake
• Analytics

What Are the Challenges and Opportunities of Cloud Data Management?

The top challenges of enterprise cloud data management software using legacy point products or tools are:

• Time consuming – Organizations have to implement a variety of solutions—from media servers to cloud gateways—to support every cloud connection. Configuring each manually requires IT budget and time.
• Limited scale – A patchwork of legacy products typically has scale limits, inhibiting IT’s to take advantage of cloud’s ability to scale up and down as needed.
• Costly – Legacy products require software licenses and infrastructure to support the software, which hit capital budgets. Operational costs also rise because of the need for people and systems resources. Moreover, organizations typically discover hidden costs of operating legacy products for the cloud, raising overall solution TCO.

The top opportunities using enterprise data management in the cloud solutions with a modern approach to cloud computing and management are:

• Lower TCO – Simplified data management in a single, modern platform lowers operating and capital costs.
• Limitless scale – Teams can scale services for data management up or down to meet business demands.
• Peace of mind – Built-in security such as ransomware recovery helps ensure data in the cloud remains protected.

What is the Value of Cloud Data Management?

Enterprise data management on cloud cuts out data silos, simplifies operations, strengthens security, and allows IT teams to uncover value across multicloud environments.

What is Cloud Data Integration?

Cloud integration with a modern hybrid cloud data management solution uses cloud-native APIs without any additional gateways or proxies. It enables tiering, archival, and replication between public and private clouds.

• Tiering – Public cloud is used as an extension of on-prem capacity
• Archival – Moving backup data to public cloud for medium- or long-term data retention
• Replication – Reproducing local capacity instances as remote public or private cloud services, for example, for low-cost disaster recovery

Cohesity and Cloud Data Management

Data used to be kept centrally in on-prem data centers. But it’s now fragmented through multiple clouds as well as local data storage—including data centers, branch offices, campuses, desktops, laptops, and even mobile devices.

You need a simple strategy for managing all this data. The traditional approach of replicating data across redundant storage units in different locations lacked visibility and a centralized way to secure or manage it. Costly and inefficient, this approach is unsustainable.

That’s why there’s Cohesity Data Management as a Service (DMaaS). It’s a portfolio of services that gives you access to the industry’s most comprehensive set of data management offerings—including backup and recovery, disaster recovery, archiving, file and object services, dev/test provisioning, data governance, and security—in a single, consolidated, very easy-to-use environment. Before this, IT would have to assemble a hodge-podge of SaaS solutions from a host of vendors, with the associated overhead of managing different service levels, license terms, and interfaces. In effect, you’d be creating the same mass data fragmentation problems you had with legacy infrastructure silos.

These are some of the important things you can do with the Cohesity DMaaS solution:

• Streamline regulatory compliance by searching, classifying, and taking action on data.
• Unify backup data across hybrid and multicloud and use a single UI to quickly search data and recover it anywhere.
• Converge point-in-time snapshots, replication, continuous data protection and automated DR failover and failback orchestration to deliver near-zero downtime and no data loss across a range of SLAs for business-critical to mission-critical applications.
• Curate data feeds to analytics or data warehouse apps to extract useful insights.

Cohesity provides the ultimate choice in how you manage and deploy cloud data management. You can choose DMaaS, self-managed software, or both—all running on the same platform and managed through the same user interface.