Qumulo: Navigating Cosmic Tug-of-War on Path to Public Cloud

By Aaron Oshita, senior product marketing manager, Qumulo, Inc.

As an IT leader, you probably didn’t think you were signing up to be the rope in an epic tug of war. But if you’re looking to move your organization’s unstructured data to the public cloud, that’s likely where you’re finding yourself. On one side, you’re feeling the lure to move “everything” to the cloud, to tap into all the benefits everyone keeps talking about: agility, simplicity, faster time to market. On the other side, the gravitational pull of multiple petabytes, even exabytes of data sitting on-premises that support so many of your business-critical applications, makes moving to the cloud daunting and nerve-wracking.

It’s natural to feel caught in the middle. The advantages of the cloud are very real-but so are the risks, challenges, and tradeoffs.

Unleashing Cloud Capabilities
First off, you’re not alone. Most IT teams today are contending with a similar challenge of moving data and workloads to the public cloud, often facing immense internal pressure. There’s a good reason for this: cloud addresses many of the most pressing challenges facing modern businesses.

These include:

• Supporting a distributed workforce and hybrid workflows: Legacy data centers were designed for a time when almost everyone worked in an office, using applications and data hosted on-premises. That’s not the world we live in today. Many knowledge workers now work remotely
  full-time or several days a week. A single team might include people located around the world, all of whom still need low-latency, high-throughput access to business data and applications. Many applications are now cloud-native themselves, hosted by companies with a global cloud presence. Having enterprise-grade file services available in the cloud can make collaboration across geographies much easier to manage, improving employee experience.
• Improving agility: When investing in new technology, building and running everything on-prem may no longer be the most efficient approach for many use cases. How long does it take to source, deploy, and provision new resources, vs. having everything you need available with a few clicks? With public cloud, you have virtually limitless compute, networking, and storage capacity on demand, and the ability to quickly add new tools and services to keep up with competitors or push ahead. Organizations that embrace the speed, simplicity and flexibility of the cloud have an inherent business advantage to adapt quickly with ever-changing market demands.
• Minimizing operational sprawl: Even as data and applications grow more integral to business operations, most organizations aren’t actually in the business of technology. Yet the resources devoted to owning and managing data centers keep growing. With public cloud, you can offload much of that effort to a provider whose core competency is managing data and infrastructure, while you focus on strategic business priorities.

For all these reasons and others (space constraints, business continuity, the drive to shift IT costs from capital to operational budgets), integrating public cloud is no longer a question of “if” for most organizations, but “when.” Yet for every advantage pulling your business towards the cloud, there are powerful forces pushing back.

Navigating Barriers
In an ideal world, moving to the cloud would be as easy as updating your routing tables and sitting back to watch the magic work. In the world we live in, however, cloud migration comes with significant complexity and risk. Among the headwinds pushing back on cloud momentum are:

• BC: Your on-prem applications draw on years, maybe decades of investment in keeping critical applications online. Even minor changes introduce risk-and moving to the cloud is not a minor change. Migrations can be very complicated, with many moving parts, new tools, and unfamiliar processes. With so much changing at once, something is bound to go wrong, which could lead to major disruptions in service and poor experiences for your end users.
• Organizational disruption: Migrating certain workloads to the cloud can impose significant change on IT organizations. Moving from on-prem to cloud file storage, for example, often means forcing teams to contend with new management interfaces, toolsets, and feature disparities. Expect a steep learning curve. Depending on what you migrate, you may need to rethink team roles, re-architect workflows, and even bring in some new talent to help retrain and upskill your existing teams.
• Cost uncertainty: While subscription billing models offered by public clouds can help ensure more predictability for your overall IT spend, some functions, like file services, can end up being more expensive depending on your performance and capacity requirements. Cost modeling is still imperfect when you have to account for variables like your spend for data-at-rest, sustained throughput, and API transactional costs for every workload. Additionally, with so many public cloud options and tiers, and so much fine print about what is and isn’t metered, it’s still common
  for businesses to get sticker shock when receiving the first bill.
• Lack of skills: In a recent IDC survey, 70% of organizations reported a cloud skills gap, with nearly half saying it’s “severely impacting” their delivery, performance, and growth. You can upskill your people, but that takes significant time and money. Or, you can recruit a new team or outsource the migration effort. But that’s costly too, and can introduce new complexities, interdepartmental tensions, and potentially, resistance from existing staff.
• Security and compliance: Losing physical control over your data can raise security concerns-especially when you have to re-architect years of carefully planned security and governance policies. For highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services (or any business subject to E.U. privacy laws), even if a cloud provider is certified for a given regulatory regime, it’s still on you to make sure you’re never in violation.

Finding Your Balance
The tug of war between these cloud forces can make it feel like you’re in an impossible position.

But there are things you can do to put your organization on the best footing to succeed:

• Don’t treat cloud as an “all-or-nothing” proposition. Not every workload is ready to move to the cloud, and there may be good reasons to keep certain applications on prem. Even for workloads ready to migrate, carefully evaluate cloud options. Some may be a better fit in Azure than AWS, for example, or vice versa.
• Quantify risk: The best way to minimize migration risk is to follow the Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.” Consider each workload and map out the business impact if cloud migration fails. How much downtime or lost revenue would you face, and how much are you willing to absorb? Identify, plan for, and manage risks for every workload, and assume they’ll vary widely.
• Be flexible: Adding skills doesn’t have to be an “either/or” decision between upskilling or acquiring new staff. By bringing in some new talent to collaborate with existing teams, new people will benefit from institutional knowledge, while veteran workers gain new cloud proficiencies.

The tug of war between the forces drawing your data and workloads to the public cloud, and the on-prem infrastructure holding them back will likely continue, but it doesn’t have to stretch you to the breaking point. In most cases, success won’t come from choosing one side or the other, but from finding the right balance for your business.