In the digital economy, it is vital how well organizations put their data to business use. But with data growing at an exponential pace, enterprises are struggling to effectively manage their data. To solve these challenges, many organizations are looking at cloud strategies that offer the best of both worlds – the muscle of on-premises IT with the elasticity of cloud. In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Srikanth Doranadula, Senior Director and Head-Systems Business, Oracle India, explains the need for multicloud in this context and how it is the right cloud strategy for Indian businesses.
CXOToday: How can enterprises get their data management strategy right?
Srikanth Doranadula: With data growing at an exponential pace with each passing day, businesses are struggling to effectively manage their data. With organizations racing against time to transform into data-driven businesses, in most cases, an organization’s data is disparately stored, processed across the hybrid IT estate. As per Forrester research, 73% of organizations operate disparate and siloed data strategies, and 64% are still grappling with the challenge of managing a multi-hybrid infrastructure. No wonder 70% of organizations consider the need to simplify their processes as a high or critical business priority.
Organizations are turning to enterprise-grade public clouds in the first phase, while also looking to create a holistic data management strategy. As organizations prepare their move to the cloud in a phase-wise manner, experts anticipate a surge in hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments. A recent Gartner survey reveals, more than 80% of organizations using the public cloud have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy – or a combination of both.
CXOToday: In the long run, what’s better for an organization – hybrid or multi-cloud?
Srikanth Doranadula: A ‘one size fits all’ approach won’t work. That said, the key advantage with multi-cloud is that organizations and application developers can custom-pick components from multiple cloud providers to arrive at the best mix depending on their use case. This ability to be selective is very important for a data-driven organization that’s using its data as an asset. It can potentially enable the organization to move corporate data closer to key cloud services, such as high performance compute and potentially new services that allow them to seamlessly access AI/ML based advanced analytics services to design new business models.
In short, it’s not as much about moving data into the cloud, as it’s about bringing the cloud and cloud services closer to the data.
CXOToday: How do organizations get to that stage?
Srikanth Doranadula: In an ideal world, organizations would like to ‘have their IT cloud cake and eat it too’ sooner rather than later. In other words, they’d give anything to find a model that offers the elasticity of the cloud and the processing power of on-premises IT – the best of both worlds in a way.
Here’s where a new approach to IT, also known as ‘Cloud Adjacent Architecture’, can make a difference to those organizations still hesitant or for whatever reasons are one step away from using the public cloud. In such a model, they get to move their data onto a powerful cloud-ready infrastructure -close to the public cloud across a globally interconnected exchange of data centers. With this, enterprises can then be able to interconnect securely to the cloud, as well as other business partners, whilst also directly lowering latency and networking costs – at their pace and comfort levels they’re okay with.
CXOToday: How is Oracle planning to deliver this model?
Srikanth Doranadula: Oracle is collaborating with key hosting providers like Equinix – wherein Equinix will host the next generation of Exadata Engineered Systems directly in their data centers. This combines the joint competitive advantage of on-premises architecture with the latest and greatest generic public cloud services. In effect, organizations gain on-premise levels of performance predictability, high-availability and scalability features. With such a model, organizations also realize higher security, improved control and heightened data sovereignty, and all while still being able to embrace the public cloud. For instance, users of this solution in an Equinix setup have realized nearly 70% networking cost savings. More importantly, this Cloud Adjacent model means zero-change architecture to optimally and in parallel manage on-premise performance and security needs – as well as allow multi-cloud operational strategies. What’s more, customers get to choose who manages the data, and how it’s done, offering total flexibility and control of their Oracle stack.
CXOToday: Can you give us some examples of multi-cloud strategies in play?
Srikanth Doranadula: Smart cities is a great example, involving multi-cloud architectures, with the vast ambit of cameras, sensors and more – think of use cases spanning real-time location based insights and/or provisioning new or better services on the fly, via an app. Add multiple data streams, such as social media feed, and the equation gets more interesting. At the end of the day, such a new approach can be tapped to combine the best of both worlds within a multi-cloud model, potentially eliminating a few of the key drawbacks associated with data complexity and help usher in faster project delivery – ultimately improving the quality of lives for citizens.
