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Achieving simpler, smarter cloud deployments

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 28 Jan 2021
Werner Vorster
Werner Vorster

Cloud deployments could add to complexity, potentially creating more siloes in the enterprise architecture. This is according to Werner Vorster, country leader for South Africa at Rubrik, who was addressing a webinar hosted by Rubrik in partnership with ITWeb this week.

Vorster said that South African enterprises were typically in one of four phases of the cloud journey. Most mid-market customers are in the planning phase, unsure of how to efficiently migrate into the cloud environment; some have realised the advantages of public cloud for archival and long term retention; others have already moved some of their workloads into the cloud and are now deciding whether to migrate or deploy cloud native infrastructure; and some are in the fourth stage – already running production workloads in the cloud, and running Microsoft 365.

“We’ve seen a lot of movement in this fourth stage,” he said. “But most local customers still have an on-premises element to their architecture, and this will be the case for the foreseeable future.”

In a poll, 45% of webinar participants said they were still figuring out their cloud journey, 15% said it was ‘early days, just offloading’; 30% said they were doing some testing and development in the cloud, and 10% said they used cloud for everything.

Nicolas Groh, field CTO EMEA at Rubrik, said there was strong movement to cloud in sectors such as retail, where organisations sought cost savings across hundreds or thousands of outlets. “By storing all the data from each shop into the cloud, and deploying simpler technology into each of the shops; organisations are eliminating the need for multiple servers in shops.”

However, he noted that there was not only one route to cloud: organisations needed to consider whether they wanted to lift and shift, use PaaS, SaaS, or born-in-the-cloud methodology, and they had to ensure they simplified the management of the environment.

Some organisations found that their cloud deployments actually resulted in more siloes, and increased the complexity of the environment.

Nicolas Groh
Nicolas Groh

Rubrik's platform

The Rubrik platform has been built with modernisation and automation at the core, said Vorster. 

“There are several unique things about our platform. The first is SLA automation. We replace the thousands of backup jobs with just a few policies that can be applied across all your workloads," he said. "And we backup not just the data, but also the metadata. So Rubrik understands the where, the when, and the how of your data. And that lets Rubrik get more out of your data.”

Rubrik is designed to recover quickly, with global search across the entire environment, and is intuitive to use, Vorster added.

But what makes Rubrik unique and most secure, is that once backup data is written, it can never be changed.

Werner Vorster

“Rubrik was designed to be API-first. With the Rubrik API, you can deliver new, automated services across any topology, a previously impossible feat. And finally, Rubrik is secure, and has been designed to fit large organisations’ security requirements. But what makes Rubrik unique and most secure, is that once backup data is written, it can never be changed. This is important because it delivers protection against ransomware.”

He said Rubrik helps with the journey to the cloud in three ways: making it easy to archive  data in lower cost, long-term storage in the cloud; lifting and shifting  applications onto the cloud; and ensuring cloud applications are protected. "Since we have a copy of all your data and the associated metadata, we are able to use those backups to get more out of your data,” said Vorster.

Rubrik demonstrated its features for cloud backup and data management, including a unified console, policy-driven automation, cloud data archival, data encryption, compliance and capacity reporting, deduplication, granular transfer out, global real-time ‘Google-like’ search, and the ability to instantiate applications in the cloud for disaster recovery and test/dev.

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