Multicloud Data Fabric Use Cases with Faction
Transcript
(upbeat rock music) (engine rumbles) >> Hey, how's it going, it's Keith Townsend, principal of the CTO Advisor. We're on the CTO Advisor road trip talking again with Matt Wallace, CTO of Faction, Inc. Matt, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you. Glad to be here with you. >> So Matt, over the past two years, me and you have been getting into these really abstract conversations about multicloud, and data, and how to leverage data across multicloud. And I think one of the good things that we can do, both CTO advisors is talk kind of the high level of how did we get here?
Like two years ago, we were talking about hybrid multicloud, imaginary. Now we're talking about multicloud, real. I've always said it was imaginary. You've always said it was real. I think I have to eat a little crow, it's real. >> I appreciate that. " And I mean, I don't want to quibble about the taxonomy, right? You want to call it multicloud, it's multicloud, but our vision for multicloud, was multiple clouds used in harmony in some sort of strategic way.
And that, I think, is getting more common, but it was really rare then, and we're seeing it more now. >> So back then, I saw a lot of accidental multicloud. It was via MNA, via just shadow IT. " >> Multiple clouds, which is not necessarily the same as multicloud. >> And customers within customers were building multicloud applications without any real strategy around data compliance, data protection, et cetera. >> Yep, and I'm not panning it. If you have a team that wants to use one cloud and another team that wants to use another, it's not inherently wrong, but you're being sort of derelict in your duty, when you don't think about what happens when all of my teams end up needing to access the same data, that's where you need a plan and a strategy.
And that's where some people kind of fall short and we're seeing a lot of people need some help nowadays. >> So talk to me about those use cases. What are some of the use cases that Faction, Inc. has seen out in the field for multiple files? >> Sure, well, for multicloud and I'm going to talk about multicloud and sometimes it is starting in multiple clouds and it's a question of how do you bring it together? So, I mean, you could pick a high level, anything that has a lot of data where you have more than one team or more than one organization that needs to access it.
I think the place where we've seen the most interest is actually in healthcare and life sciences. So nowadays there's been this huge cost reduction in things, doing things like genomic processing and that type of analytics with life science data. And so you see, not only many teams across a huge company like doing pharmaceutical work and that sort of thing, trying to collaborate with the same genomes and the same other data, but you also see different organizations collaborating. One might specialize in drug development with DNA.
The other might be doing something cutting edge with RNA, and they want to work together and put parts of their data pipeline together. And so whether it's multiple teams or different enterprises, you see them trying to figure out, hey, how can we run different applications or stages of an application without having to move or copy data, without data gravity, making this just slow as molasses. >> So I've lived this, I've worked for a large bio-pharmaceutical, and even without talking about that, there are some public stuff about what the University of Oregon and Universities of Washington have done about collaborating with academics, collaborating with commercial space and the ability to separate use cases and use the same datasets.
I built what we call data canons in the private IT space to get data from on premises to our academic partners so we could collaborate. Why move the data, if you can use the data in the same send, from the same centralized location. Now with that comes a bunch of technical challenges. We're going to get into the technical challenges in the next conversation, but before we get into that conversation, I want to delve a little bit more into this difference between multiple clouds and multicloud.
How did you define the difference between multiple clouds, having a relationship with AWS, Salesforce, IBM, Google, Azure, versus multicloud? >> Sure, if you have multiple clouds and they each have their own data, and their own use case, or their own team, and there isn't a driving reason to unify those, I say, lucky you. That's multiple clouds, each separate for their own purpose. Multicloud happens when you start, whether intentionally or because it's sort of thrust upon you, things like mergers and acquisitions tend to make this your problem, whether you wanted it or not.
But once you have an environment where you have the same data and you have different teams that really want to access it for different purposes, you're in a multicloud situation now, whether you want to be or not. And you can solve that by trying to distribute the data, replicate it, copy it, like your data canon example, right? People are solving a problem that way. This is why I like to talk about what Faction has done, because it really allows you to have a new architecture with this centralized data repository, but access to all the clouds and all the services at the same time, without a copy, without any movement.
And once you see two different teams and two different applications touching the same data, literally seconds apart, without having to do any movement, and you realize that data can be at any scale, even many, many petabytes, it unlocks the possibility for how your teams can work together and collaborate. >> So, Matt, I really enjoy you taking this beautiful walk. And Colorado, this is like amazing. , you can click the link below. com/road-trip to find out where we've been in this great country of ours.
If I didn't ask Matt tough enough questions, go watch the technical video and we're even tougher on him. Or you can DM me at CTOAdvisor on Twitter, DMs are open. Talk to you next CTO Dose.
