Untangled: The ActualTech Cloud Solutions Megacast
Although the cloud is rapidly maturing, it’s fair to say that most companies are still trying to figure out their cloud strategy: what workloads to put there, the proper mix of public and private clouds, determining the risks vs. benefits, costs, CapEx vs. OpEx… the list goes on.
To add to the choices is the number of cloud vendors out there, ready to help your business. All this means that knowing where to start can be a huge challenge. That’s where our Cloud Solutions Megacast, held on Nov. 15, 2019, can help.
Eight vendors presented their solutions during the show. Their aim was to help attendees understand their value proposition, and untangle their offerings vs. the competition. It was a well-attended and successful event, and you can watch the entire thing right here. We’ll provide a quick breakdown of each vendor’s presentation, so you can see what they can do for your organization.
Cohesity
The event kicked off with Cohesity, which talked about the “enterprise cloud journey” and where companies might be on that road. They discussed how they can simplify data protection, no matter where you are on that journey.
Cohesity focused specifically on the Office 365 suite, along with associated Microsoft products including OneDrive and Azure.
Cohesity also provided a backup and recovery requirements checklist, which is something every company using O365 and the Azure platform should have—and use.
Veeam
Veeam, in its session, aimed to combat what it called “Confusion as a Service,” which it described as the plethora of service options available, and the lack of clarity around many of them.
For instance, there’s Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and more. They mean very different things, although they have similarities as well.
Understanding those differences is key to getting the most value out of your cloud services, and Veeam went over them in detail.
Druva
Druva talked about data protection for the cloud era. This is obviously of critical importance, as data has broken through the traditional boundaries of the data center, and can now be located pretty much anywhere.
That’s a scary thought for CIOs, CTOs, admins and the entire IT staff. Offloading that chore to a company that specializes in it, like Druva, can give you peace of mind and free up your people for more bottom-line activities, allowing them to drive more value.
Druva also demonstrated its value proposition with several case studies that demonstrated how their customers are using their platform.
Red Hat
Red Hat’s presentation was all about taming hybrid clouds. They emphasized that both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments have a key benefit in allowing an organization to match the workload to the best type of cloud for that workload.
Of course, it helps to know exactly what kind of cloud you’re talking about. Part of Red Hat’s session was dedicated to defining what they mean by “hybrid” and “multi” clouds—an important first step, since there can be confusion on those points.
Red Hat also provided an excellent overview of containers, which are becoming a core technology that enables the cloud.
SADA
SADA is a company you need to know about if you’re using the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as they’re specialists in helping businesses move data and operations to GCP.
Even knowing where to start, however, can be daunting. That’s where SADA comes in, as they walk companies through the enormous complexities that are involved in a cloud transformation.
In short, they deliver what you can see in the screenshot here: a clean, simple path to GCP with certified experts who have done this many times before.
Nutanix
The focus for Nutanix during this Megacast was private cloud: both the benefits of having one, and then how to build it in a simple way.
It’s clear, Nutanix said, that companies need the rapid time to market, flexible consumption model, and innovation provided by public clouds. The issue for many, however, is that the public cloud just isn’t an option for every workload. This is leading to many workloads that are moved to the public cloud eventually being moved back to on-premises environments.
But that doesn’t have to mean giving up those aforementioned advantages—a private cloud can still offer them, while giving organizations control once again.
Rapid7
One downside of the public cloud is undoubtedly the increased attack surface. Rapid7 talked about those new threats, and how to deal with them.
Some of the issues include: lack of visibility into the environment, the overwhelming amount of time it takes to find, track, and remediate issues, and alert fatigue for security admins. These are serious problems, and getting worse as the cloud becomes more prevalent.
The Rapid7 “Insight” suite of security information and event management (SIEM) services offers unified data collection that reduces the complexity of managing cloud security to minimize response time, and maximize efficiency.
Rubrik
At the outset of its presentation, Rubrik asked a simple question: “Why choose cloud for data protection?” It then answered that question in a powerful way.
As you implement more workloads, automation becomes crucial. But with that automation comes a caution: it’s important to have both consistency of security and consistency of data. Rubrik said a lot of companies don’t understand the difference, and they need to, before moving to the cloud.
Another important factor to realize is that cloud security is a shared responsibility. Rubrik warned attendees that cloud providers don’t automatically provide things like data protection and backup, so it’s important to have a partner that can help you with those aspects.
Dropping Cloud Knowledge
Attendees for this Cloud Solutions Megacast came out with a lot more information than they had going in, which is the goal of every ActualTech Media event. Click on the link to sign up for more events that fill your knowledge gaps and introduce you to companies that are eager to help you get more out of your IT operations.
