Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At Data Summit Connect 2020, Clay Jackson, senior database systems sales engineer, Quest Software Inc, discussed how hybrid cloud—combining public, community, and private cloud, and features of SaaS and IaaS—provides the best of both worlds for organizations migrating their data.
Full videos of Data Summit Connect 2020 presentations are available at www.dbta.com/DBTA-Downloads/WhitePapers.
"How do you choose your location wisely? Some of the things you might want to consider, first of all, are security and compliance,"said Jackson.
HIPAA or other types of medical data should not be in the cloud or in the hands of researchers that take that data home with them on laptop computers.
"The VA had a pretty spectacular breach because of that. Not too long ago, same with PCI—credit card numbers and accounts and things of that nature—and even good old Sarbanes-Oxley that we've been limited for a long time. Also, you want to consider things like performance and network traffic. Where your data is located can be very important. If all your data users are here in the U.S., you probably don't want to locate your data in Singapore or India, or somewhere in China," Jackson said.
Public cloud is the least expensive but the least secure, he explained. It's very easy to expand and contract. Network traffic may be an issue and users may want to consider bandwidth costs and latency.
Community cloud is more secure than public, he said. One of the early community clouds was built up for just that—the intelligence community cloud that was built inside the Amazon Gov environment.
With private cloud organizations get to decide whether it can be on-premise or remote. A remote private cloud is the most secure: hardware, your clouds, and the environment are behind a cage or is in a cage.
"So you might have faster access doing private cloud than you would with any other cloud environment software," Jackson said. "Software as a Service, we talked about. It's almost always remote, no infrastructure costs, but you're giving up security, and in some cases, control of your data. And you want to make sure that data is really yours. If you're using data from a software service vendor somewhere, make sure you have control over that data, or you can trace that data, and that the data is in fact, yours. Again, you've got the network to look out for."
Platform as a Service is almost always remote but the benefits are reduced infrastructure costs. Security and control is still a concern, he said.
"So what's the best model? We think that a hybrid cloud is probably where you want to go. You're going to get the best of all of the above. You can pick and choose where you want to put your data—some of it on-prem, some of it in the cloud," Jackson said. So you really do get the best of both worlds. You don't completely eliminate on-premise costs, but you can control them, because you're only keeping the stuff on-premise that needs to be on-premise. It's probably the most resource-intensive, but it does address network and security concerns. And again, you can put the data where you want it. If you've got users in Singapore, you can put some data in Singapore and some data in Portland, Oregon, and you're not going to have to deal with network latency and some of those other issues."