In many IT infrastructures, data gravity hampers the movement of data between the cloud and an on-premises data centre, which makes the use of cloud resources less efficient.
So says Konstantin Ebert, senior director Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia and CIS at NetApp, who notes an increasing challenge for IT managers is to implement a multi-cloud infrastructure with the necessary data control.
Data gravity is an analogy of the nature of data and its ability to attract additional applications and services. The law of gravity states the attraction between objects is directly proportional to their weight or mass.
Blogger Dave McCrory coined the term data gravity to describe the phenomenon in which the number or quantity and the speed at which services, applications, and even customers are attracted to data increases as the mass of the data also increases.
"Data is increasingly important for any business. As a result, CIOs need to continuously optimise their data management strategies to adapt. A key component here is the cloud," says Ebert.
He adds CIOs are now under more pressure than ever before to support the digital transformation of processes through flexibly deployable IT resources. "The cloud is instrumental for this. Depending on the format and sensitivity of business data, it can sometimes remain idle. This is known as gravity - data 'sticks' within the existing infrastructure."
According to Ebert, there are different factors that create data gravity, such as the size of data. He points out it can be a challenge to migrate a multi-terabyte storage infrastructure to a new platform.
Also, applications that require fast access to data can make it difficult to switch to a new system platform, he says.
European Union regulation and guidelines also make certain stipulations around data governance, such as that personal information can only be saved to servers that are local to where the business operates, Ebert explains.
"These examples show how data gravity occurs and how data can be closely connected to a particular infrastructure. This makes it difficult for IT experts to move data into and out of the cloud and to dissolve existing data siloes within an organisation."
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