Unlocking Business Value from your Hybrid Cloud Journey

Rapidly evolving technology has brought powerful benefits to organizations—along with significant new challenges. As business environments constantly change and grow, new platforms, systems, and architectures increase IT complexity while older investments slow innovation. Without an effective way to manage and protect data across this transforming environment, an organization’s digital ambitions can quickly bog down.

More organizations are moving toward a hybrid cloud environment during this digital transformation journey to reduce their geographical footprint, reduce costs and protect against data loss in the event of a disaster.

“80% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy“

What does it mean to be hybrid cloud ready?

• Streamline: Move, manage and use data more easily no matter where it’s stored – cloud or on-premises.
• Scale: Get large amounts of data and workloads to the cloud quickly and securely so you can get all the agility, cost efficiencies and IT modernization that your cloud strategy was designed to have.
• Protect: Secure your cloud data wherever it goes, in flight and at rest. Be able to recover it fast, in a usable format, no matter what happens. And hit those SLAs to keep your business flowing at digital speed.

What are the requirements for successful cloud data management?

As the move to hybrid-cloud accelerates, it’s vital that data protection strategies progress and that on-premises data management and protection take on cloud characteristics of agility, flexibility, and scalability.

• Flexible Mobility
• Automation
• Flexible delivery model
• Industry-leading depth and breadth of workload support
• Scalability
• Security
• Unified View of Data

Let’s dive into the different ways a successful hybrid cloud journey paired with a modern data protection strategy will unlock value for your business. Is your data storage hybrid cloud ready and future-proof?

Improved Connectivity:

Part of digital transformation is cloud transformation – you need the ability to seamlessly move data and workloads across every type of infrastructure, both on-premises and cloud, to best meet ever-changing business requirements. Native integration with clouds and data encryption means fast, secure migration for your applications, databases, virtual machines and large data sets. Think of when the pandemic hit and basically overnight, organizations had to adjust to not only their employee’s data, but also customer data becoming remote and pushing the edge of their environments out further.

A hybrid cloud environment with modern data protection means improved data agility to move data not only between a physical location and a single cloud provider, but also between multiple cloud providers. Having this type of flexible mobility within a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environment will help you to keep up with changes in your environment that you simply cannot plan for. This improved connectivity will result in better customer service, room for new product development and growth opportunities for the company.

Forty-five percent of companies reporting a positive business impact of digital transformation also reported higher net revenue growth. (Deloitte)

Increased Productivity:

Everyone understands the philosophy of trying to work smarter, not harder and the same applies to your IT environment. With workforces being scattered all over the world, your IT ecosystem needs to work smarter in order to execute with the same amount of resources. Every organization would benefit from the automation of IT tasks – who wouldn’t want the data to work for the business and optimize operational efficiency as a result?

A modern data management platform enables you to automate the storage, protection, optimization and usage of your business-critical data. With automation your organization will streamline operations and improve security with capabilities that empower employees to make informed decisions quickly, which allows them to have more time to share innovative ideas that lead to healthy business growth. Better automation and insights also drive productivity by increasing efficiencies and reducing error rates.

Artificial intelligence and machine-learning driven data insights for modern cloud data management will increase automation, speed and accuracy. Data driven insights not only improve the IT process and increase productivity, but also unlock customer insights that help drive business growth. Customer insights help you to better understand the customer and their need, so you can make more informed decisions and provide a more relevant and personalized customer experience. 

Nearly half of all companies say improving customer experience and customer satisfaction were the leading influences to start a digital transformation. (PwC)

Business Agility:

In fast-changing markets and an unpredictable world, businesses need to be able to move quickly, pivot as needed, and drive innovation without getting tripped up by a fragmented data environment.  Today’s hybrid IT environment requires a flexible data protection solution that provides coverage across all data and workloads, giving you the confidence that that your data is readily available, no matter where it lives.

So, how do you stay agile and ensure business continuity?

Consolidating point solutions to one comprehensive solution that provides coverage and support to all your workloads and applications can eliminate data fragmentation and reduce complexity in your environment. A single solution to manage and protect all data as it’s moved, managed, and used across workloads enables you to gain more insights and utilize your data for innovation and improve operations.

Do you have freedom of choice when it comes to how your solution is deployed?

A flexible delivery model gives you the ability to choose how you want your data protection delivered according to your business requirements. Consume, deploy and scale the solution how you want it using software, appliances, SaaS, or a hybrid of these to support your diverse environment today, with the confidence of knowing your future technology decisions will be supported as well – allowing you to be more agile in adapting to market conditions and remain competitive.

More than 80% of customers say that Commvault solutions enabled their organizations to be more agile in adapting to the market conditions of the past year. – IDC

Innovate at the speed the market demands:

The pandemic has taught us that we need to able to adjust our business at the drop of a pin and not only survive, but continue to be competitive. The flexibility to scale your data environment to meet your business needs and goals is paramount during digital transformation and times of change in general. The key is to avoid cloud vendor lock-in that will make it costly to get out of – move and store your data where you need it.

If you can’t scale efficiently, you risk operating at a higher cost and being left behind by the competition. You need the ability to scale up AND down as your organization transforms and your data keeps growing; reducing the need for permanent compute and storage. Get large amounts of data and workloads to the cloud quickly and securely so you can get all the agility, cost efficiencies and IT modernization that your cloud strategy was designed to have.

“Nearly half of respondents in a Flexera survey use increased speed of innovation as a metric for assessing their progress against cloud goals.” Source: Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report

Digital Resiliency:

While organizations are trying to innovate to keep up with the market, digital resiliency and security are still top of mind. In fact, CIOs say the main reason their tech budget is increasing this year is because of the need to improve security measures. Source: State of the CIO, 2022

As you’re in the process of moving workloads to the cloud, let’s say you realize a certain data set is not protected by your current data protection solution. Your migration is now halted as you have to go find a point solution that will not only cover this specific workload, but also integrate with your entire IT environment. Having to do this even once makes migration to the cloud more laborious and time consuming, but also will create potential security gaps that could leave your environment at risk.

As the number and types of workloads increase in your environment, so does the complexity of protecting and managing them. You need a solution that will allow you to manage your environment from a single command center while providing the industry’s broadest workload coverage. The solution also needs to ensure business continuity and verifiable recoverability across your on-prem and cloud environments through replication, disaster recovery, and compliance reporting. This improved digital resiliency will improve recovery time in the event of a disaster as well as avoid downtime when you are modernizing and moving to the cloud

How Commvault Helps Organizations Unlock Business Value

More organizations are moving toward a hybrid cloud environment to reduce their geographical footprint, reduce costs and protect against data loss in the event of a disaster. The power of Commvault is realized through its SaaS solution, Metallic that provides data management wherever your data lives – on-premises, in the cloud and anywhere in between. Metallic’s comprehensive line of SaaS solutions is fully integrated into the Commvault portfolio, covering all the use cases customer’s need now and in the future. By providing a single, programmable data fabric spanning all your workloads, cloud zones/regions, private and public clouds, and storage tiers, your data is under your control and available when you need it.

Learn more about customers that have experienced the value of partnering with Commvault on their hybrid cloud journey. https://commvault.drift.click/embracing-the-cloud-driving-business-forward