3 Things to Consider for Multicloud Data

By Published On: November 17, 2022

What are some areas of consideration for multicloud data management? The entire CTO Advisor (CTOA) team is coming of travels where we held several conversations with customers. One of the conferences was VMware Explore conference. Shortly before Explore, CTOA attended Kubecon. While vastly different shows and audiences, each conference had cloud-native data, multicloud, and data management as common themes. What were my overall takeaways from the theme?

Ransomware Keeps CIO up at Night

CIOs have moved away from only asking how to prevent a ransomware attack to how to recover from a ransomware attack quickly. According to an IDC study, approximately 37% of global organizations were ransomware victims in 2021.

We talked to a Keith Bradley, VP of IT at Nature Fresh Farms, during  VMware Explore in Spain; Bradley shared about his environment of 1.5 million edge devices generating 25GB of data a farming season. Let’s save some math; that’s 37PB of data a tomato vine season. What happens when that data exists in retail edge locations instead of a relatively secure greenhouse?

Chief Information Security Officers need every tool available to detect and recover from ransomware. However, operators need to consider the complexity of recovery. Can a set of tools from a single vendor recover data in AWS EKS, on-premises Kubernetes, and at the edge? Can you inventory data in such a way that you understand your security posture? What about regulations?

Regulations

Government regulations were another consistent question we encountered throughout the year. The European Union has passed several rules that help protect consumer rights. However, many organizations must deal with regulators beyond the EU. We talked with a group of architects that relayed a story of compliance complexity in Switzerland.

Some of the use cases outside of the EU are untested. A CISO of a local Switzerland company requested his information using Switzerland’s data protection laws. The CISO rejected his claim and sued his company to create a legal precedent. It was a clever way to quantify the risk to an organization’s data protection policies. The important note is to ask your cloud-native data partners how they help navigate the maze of geopolitics.

Data Management Application Platform

We usually start a multicloud discussion by defining multicloud. Whatever your definition of multicloud, your challenges remain the same. How do you apply your organization’s data protection and management policies across multiple clouds and infrastructures?

An organizational policy may state that personally identifiable data must follow data protection and management rules regardless of platform as follows:

–                 Ransomware recovery time or X-Hours

–                 Compliant with various geographic protection and retention laws

–                 Data encryption at rest

With a push to create platform teams responsible for developer experience, how do you give developers the ability to surface and apply these policies? How do you make it a part of the development pipeline? How do you detect and report compliance with your data management policies programmatically for Kubernetes? How do you upgrade the platform and adopt new features at the speed of cloud providers?

 

 

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