HITS

Cloud storage has made significant advancements over the past few years and there are three major reasons for media and entertainment organizations to implement a hybrid cloud strategy now if it hasn’t already done so, according to Drew Schlussel, director of product marketing at Wasabi.

“We certainly believe that cloud storage is where the industry is going,” he said Feb. 15 during the webinar “3 Reasons To Implement a Hybrid Cloud Strategy NOW, Starting with Storage.”

Those three reasons he cited are:

1. The state of the art for cloud storage has evolved significantly and now delivers the necessary performance and protection for enterprise applications at a price that “obliterates” on-premise and hyperscaler offerings.
2. Data gravity is “heavy.” Starting with storage lays the critical foundation to building your organization’s hybris cloud architecture for the best technical and economic results.
3. Enterprises small and large are benefiting as more independent service providers align to compete with the hyperscalers and provide greater agility for data and workload mobility.

“One of the big things driving hybrid cloud strategies and the movement to cloud services is digital transformation,” Schlussel told viewers. “While I believe a lot of folks are already using the cloud in some way, shape or form, we estimate that a large percentage – perhaps even 80 percent of companies – still have not made any significant move of their core IT operations to the cloud.”

Meanwhile, “digital transformation seems to be changing in a very significant way,” he said, adding: “While that term and that idea has been around for a few years or more, it certainly gets a lot of credit for changing the way people think about it.”

Quoting Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and executive chair, Schlussel said: “In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility. That’s it. Because nothing else is sustainable. Everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.”

Agility is the key word, Schlussel noted, adding cloud storage “can give you the agility that you need [and] is paramount to this conversation.”

He also provided three strong reasons for using cloud storage today:

1. Data (structured and unstructured)is growing at 40-80% year over year, breaking on-premise storage budgets.
2. The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is extending the usefulness and value of past, present and future data, increasing the demand for more capacity.
3. Ransomware attacks are increasing the demand for immutable, [logically] air-gapped storage, providing a “secure data haven.”

“It’s sad but true that ransomware has become an industry,” he went on to say. You have ransomware as a service now” and an attack can be launched on “practically anyone, and I think they are doing that,” he said.

Although companies are “doing backups today with other security measures, if they’re compromised, backups  [are] compromised as well,” he pointed out. “But, if you’re using cloud storage, you’re creating a logically air-gapped storage backup and, if you’re using immutability [bucket and object locking], you’re creating a copy of that backup that nobody can touch.”

AI and ML, meanwhile, represents the “major engine tying into all of this,” he said.

“The rapid adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence is certainly extending the usefulness and value of past, present and future data, and that is increasing the demand for more capacity,” he said.

Meanwhile, the sector is moving from 4K to 8K and “who knows what’s over the horizon” after that, Schlussel said.

By 2026, large enterprises are expected to triple their unstructured data capacity stored as file or object on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared to 2021, he also told viewers.

On-prem storage systems, meanwhile, are inefficient and expensive and users don’t get what they pay for, according to Schlussel.

Moving on to the evolution of cloud storage, he said Cloud 1.0 storage tiering is overly complex and confusing, joking (at least, in part, anyway) that you may need at least a masters degree in finance to understand the bill you get.

Cloud 2.0 thankfully “fixed a lot of the issues with cost and complexity,” he said. noting it offers simpler and predictable pricing and “serves as the foundation of your hybrid cloud strategy” now.

Storage has been largely an afterthought but that is changing, he went on to say.

“The world is certainly moving towards hybrid cloud – or let’s say multicloud –  architecture and we believe that the best of breed approach is really what will prevail,” he added.