We lately hear the term ‘hybrid cloud’ associated with migrating SaaS apps or mobile apps, and their related storage needs, into multiple flavors of public and private cloud environments. After all, deploying your app flexibly in 3 clouds, or 6-to-the-nth power clouds, should work out to be better, faster or cheaper, and give customers a better experience, right?
Kind of a simplistic understanding of hybrid cloud for higher volume concerns.
The real-world cloud ambition of enterprises and government entities is much bigger. To meet large-scale challenges, they plan to load up hybrid cloud resources with increasingly heavyweight data processing and storage workloads. Can heterogeneous cloud resources handle it?
Why weigh down hybrid cloud with infrastructure?
The incremental cost benefits of going to cloud are now well documented, including a massive reduction in cost of entry along with an estimated 40-45% reduction in TCO over the life of the implementation, depending on the industry. Investments and costly maintenance in datacenters should be offset by more flexible compute and storage resources that could be accounted for as operational expense, rather than capital expense.
Many forayed into public cloud earlier in the decade, realizing improvements in ease of entry and enjoying pay-as-you-go flexibility at first. Soon, some unprecedented service costs emerged as the scale of implementations increased. Early adopters were constantly doubling demand for storage and compute power, as well as realizing a dependency on a single vendor as they started to expand their public cloud footprint.
Then, auditors in various jurisdictions began acting on the reality that a public cloud service can mean ‘the data is somewhere else,’ or commingled in a shared datacenter next to other applications of unknown origin. In light of privacy standards such as HIPAA in healthcare or government requirements for managing evidence, better control, segmentation and quality assurance needs to be applied in any cloud approach.
Scenario One: Managed Hybrid Cloud Datacenters
Organizations want the best of both worlds from their data center. They want to retain control and compliance to standards, with best-in-class resiliency, security and performance, while realizing the instant scalability and flexible cost benefits of public cloud.
The management of high-volume data in public cloud, as well as the potential cost of exponentially increasing storage requirements over a rather bandwidth-constrained connection, proved daunting at first.
No wonder so many organizations ran back to the promise of private cloud. Installing a shared computing and storage resource inside an owned datacenter was kind of a half-measure of improvement, if it meant IT buyers were basically back to provisioning and buying enough up-front infrastructure to meet anticipated needs.
With bandwidth and innovative management control and compliance solutions improving every day, private cloud buyers now demand an easy way to roll certain workloads and backups over to public cloud resources when it is called for. Nobody wants to sign themselves up for owning all their own infrastructure forever.
A new Policy-Driven Hybrid Cloud Datacenter approach should provide the security, centralization and compliance benefits of on-premise data centers, while still providing the breakout flexibility benefits of using on-demand public cloud resources from whichever CSP provides the necessary functional, Quality of Service (QoS), and location characteristics.
One approach to this problem comes out of the field of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), where a common Activity Management control plane like provided in Pivot3’s Acuity HCI platform is extended to prioritize workloads and secure data replication to span on-premises and vendor-managed datacenters. The Acuity Management Application, for example, orchestrates data replication between on-premise and AWS by controlling an instance of the Acuity HCI software running in AWS using simple data protection policy assignments which can also be changed on the fly or via scheduled changes based on changes in business requirements.
Scenario 2: Video and Surveillance in Smart Cities and Law Enforcement
Welcome to the Videowave. Media content now surpasses all other forms of enterprise data stored by volume. Even with Silicon Valley’s best working on the next great compression algorithm, audiovisual content drives a massive wave of petabytes to contend with.
Where does all of this data come from? To be sure, we are already familiar with on-demand entertainment video services and apps like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. That accounts for a huge chunk of Internet traffic, but their bespoke hybrid clouds aren’t our concern.
Besides, if your video locks up in the middle of binge-watching Narcos, it might be annoying as a customer, but nobody gets in real trouble.
Let’s go bigger.
Let’s talk about public video data at the level of cities and nation-states. Forward-thinking ‘Smart Cities’ using video as a core part of managing their growth and physical infrastructure as well as ensuring public safety.
Hundreds of traffic cameras to monitor and plan traffic patterns, cameras monitoring weather for disaster preparedness, cameras and sensors watching bridges and buildings for alerting structural problems, all generating continuous streaming video feeds.
But by far the most critical video data streams of government organizations are Law Enforcement and Surveillance workloads. Failure to perform in capturing and properly storing video data impacts public safety as well as making or breaking criminal and civil court cases.
From nations like Colombia to local city police departments like Austin, Texas, governments are outfitting police and security forces with in-vehicle and on-body cameras, designed to capture every relevant moment in time, and keep every encounter recorded and stored as potential video or audio evidence.
Needless to say, law enforcement can drive a high volume of very critical video data with the most stringent policy concerns. To be useful as evidence in court, each video asset must be appropriately authorized, stored and backed up, securely managed, authorized maintained with an airtight chain of custody.
One solution in this space involves joining a hybrid cloud Law Enforcement video archive from Pivot3 and Iron Mountain that captures the best possible quality videos from devices, onto securely encrypted flash or drive memory, into a secure “Evidence Locker” environment certified by the well-known document security company Iron Mountain.
The Intellyx Take
For Hybrid Clouds to handle big, mission-critical data workflows without getting weighed down by capacity and regulatory ballast, they need to offer a simple, policy-driven way to securely move workloads and data files to the most resilient and performant infrastructure available.
Failing to ensure that compliant data management practices are ensured by policy can mean a failure to ever get away from on-premises datacenters. This can result in the early obsolescence of a company in relation to its nimbler peers.
In the case of public safety and law enforcement, a failure to properly handle evidence can cause threats to the well-being of citizens, as well as failed prosecutions and wrongful convictions. Miss out on managing this right, and lawsuits are sure to follow.
© 2019, Intellyx, LLC. The content of this article is the sole responsibility of Intellyx. At the time of this writing, Pivot3 is an Intellyx customer. No other vendors or persons mentioned in the article are Intellyx customers. Image sources: Videowall, Storyblocks (bluefug licensed); Clouds, ChristopherBa, Flickr open source.
