Hybrid IT Data Protection Maturity

I the last 24-hours over $760 million has been invested into two companies that on the surface are IT backup products. With Cloud computing is quickly becoming a center for enterprise data, one has to question the valuation of these companies. The CTO Advisor has held the position that this data protection space isn’t about backup. It’s about the ability to leverage data regardless of the location.

Cloud computing companies will continue to add capabilities such as ML/AI and even Quantum computing that will not easily deploy inside the four walls of traditional enterprises. CTO’s will be challenged to leverage these services against massive quantities of data. The need for low latency to these data sets may very well become the new arms race in enterprise data.

It’s why I believe the $3.3 Billion evaluation for a company like Rubrik is just a drop in the bucket of the total addressable market for what we call data protection today. I created this maturity scale as a tool to help identify where your data protection/management strategy resides on the hype curve. While I haven’t published it until today, it’s already a year old. I’ve moved on to a “Data Infrastructure” framework. Let me know if you’d be interested I a private walkthrough of the framework.

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Understanding Multi-Cloud for the non-IT Executive

Increased productivity powers economic growth. A recent replay of Planet Money discussed the power of well - power. The ability to do more with less increases efficiency of a system. Increased efficiency leads to gains in productivity. Thus increased economic activity. It’s a simple concept of economics.

Public cloud is another example. Small and large businesses alike take advantage of what appears infinite scale of services from AWS, Google Compute, and Microsoft Azure. The services are cheap and highly effective when used in chunks. However, organizations have discovered moving entirely to these services exclusively proves cost prohibitive.

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The ever expanding scope of Infrastructure

Consider some simple parallels with the transportation industry as you continue to examine how Public Cloud impacts your existing IT infrastructure. Ground transportation offers a tremendous mix of capabilities from rail, trucks, and light vehicles. Data center infrastructure provides the most flexibility, including legacy app support. There are some things you'd never transport by air as it makes little sense. 

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Is Nutanix a Cloud Company?

One of the most popular videos on the portal describes how Nutanix isn't a cloud company. After hosting theCube for Nutanix .NEXT 2018, I thought it time to ask and answer the question again. 

What value does Nutanix bring environments looking to adopt enterprise cloud technologies? What were the key announcements from .NEXT that point to a coherent cloud strategy and where are the gaps? 
This Analyst Note discusses the big takeaways from the conference. 

Moving SAP and other legacy apps to the cloud

Moving legacy application architectures to the public cloud bring with it many challenges. In many cases, it’s a question of finding a problem for the solution public cloud offers. On the surface, the architecture of legacy applications doesn’t appear complementary to public cloud design and consumption. However, there are use cases where legacy applications fit natively into the public cloud.

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Rubrik - A metadata company in backup company's clothing

I’ve poked and prodded the team at Rubrik since first briefed on their data protection product. The spokespeople remain careful in the description of the product suite. It is a data protection product with additional benefits powered by a powerful metadata engine. Make no mistake Rubrik’s product is a robust metadata driven foundation that has data protection features.  The company marketing remains careful not to compete with primary storage companies directly or claim primary storage functionality. 

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Webinar - Disaster recovery in the era of Public Cloud

Disaster recovery is hard enough. People and process are equally important as the technology. Our presenter, Keith Townsend led the effort for the disaster recovery design and operations for a Fortune 200's SAP implementation. 

Keith will share learnings from that experience beyond SAP and how Public Cloud brings the similar technical capability to smaller organizations.

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Current state of TLS encryption and data loss protection

I’ve worked enterprise IT for far too long to fall into the “privacy at work is king” camp. If you use your organization's resources, then you may give up the right to privacy at work. I’ve implemented data loss protection (DLP) software for a 12,000-user U.S. Federal agency. Users don’t like it. It impacts system performance, and automatic encryption of removable devices makes data sharing more difficult. However, the worse scenario is having an Equifax like headline hit the news. Such breaches are why encryption breaking technology for snooping on employees remains interesting.

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