According to IBM, 85 percent of enterprises operate in multi-cloud environments. However, only 41 percent of these enterprises have a management strategy in place. RackWare’s new Hybrid Cloud Platform aims to solve this by offering multi-functionality in a way that helps enterprises migrate to the cloud more easily and for businesses to implement a cloud-based approach to disaster recovery.
To understand how hybrid cloud solutions can benefit businesses and to understand the new solution from RackWare, Digital Journal spoke with the company’s CEO and Co-Founder Sash Sunkara.
Digital Journal: How important is cloud computing for businesses?
Sash Sunkara: Cloud computing is becoming vital for businesses. Virtually all businesses are either relying on cloud computing for important aspects of their IT needs or they have a plan to do so. This is because cloud offers speed, agility, flexibility, and most importantly, the potential for cost reduction.
IT organizations benefit from cloud computing by eliminating the need to worry about the physical infrastructure, such as power, cooling, and building maintenance as well as securing and maintaining hardware.
DJ: What security risks exist with cloud computing?
Sunkara: Security risks for cloud computing today are largely the same as in the datacenter. There is a slight added risk as cloud environments are often multitenant. But the multitenant technology is highly secure in today’s clouds. Layers of security are required, as always, along with the necessary prioritization of workload risk and appropriate measures to deal with the relative priorities. More sensitive workloads require more security measures.
DJ: What is different about the Hybrid Cloud Platform to other cloud solutions?
Sunkara: Hybrid cloud includes private aspects of computing, such as a private cloud or a datacenter with cloud-interaction. While there are many advantages, utilizing the hybrid cloud requires more planning. This is because overlaying security on both environments is necessary along with sharing of appropriate resources.
DJ: How about RackWare’s solution?
Sunkara: RackWare’s Hybrid Cloud Platform is a distributed software solution that helps Cloud Service Providers enable enterprises to increase and maximize cloud use. Its multifunctionality allows enterprises to migrate to the cloud seamlessly, implement a cloud-based approach to disaster recovery and proactively facilitate oversight and control of all cloud resources.
The solution also substantially reduces the ongoing cost of IaaS resources while paving the way for enterprises to leverage data in RackWare’s any-to-any hybrid cloud environment, where users can move workloads between different cloud platforms and hypervisor types. The solution can manage migrations involving physical servers, clusters, large databases, network storage, physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-physical and right-sizing.
In addition to this, the Hybrid Cloud Platform can failover and fallback in disaster recovery situations.
DJ: What were the main complexities with developing the technology?
Sunkara: The technology itself is rarely where the ultimate complexity surfaces. The hard part is providing seamless interaction with and migration from legacy systems. The two important aspects of technology development are often ignored or assumed to be trivial, however, they are essential for any new technology to be developed and adopted.
DJ: Which types of businesses do you work with?
Sunkara: RackWare helps numerous verticals including financial, healthcare, retail, energy/utility, education and government with cloud migration and disaster recovery.
