Looking at modern IT infrastructures, it is clear we have mostly entered a cloud-first era. Even more traditional enterprises are incorporating a cloud strategy at the risk of being out-innovated or outpaced by their competition.

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” — Bill Gates

While the public cloud has gained a lot of attention with the rise of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, it is important to still ask yourself which “cloud-like” characteristics and services can benefit your particular environment. Not every business will benefit from moving completely into the public cloud. To solve for your specific use case, you need to look at all the tools at your disposal.

Journey to the Cloud

Not everyone takes the same path to the cloud, nor should they.

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As Eric Shanks wrote in his Gestalt IT blogpost, “Rubrik’s own Internet page title is ‘The Cloud Data Management Company’ which just screams at customers that it’s a cutting edge future looking company.”

I agree that cloud-washing is rampant, and cloud should be considered less of a check box and more of a tool for additional choice and flexibility. Rubrik has enabled consumption of public cloud resources since version one of the product by allowing customers to achieve cloud economics with long-term retention/archival data on Amazon S3 instead of tape. Cloud archiving also makes archived data easily accessible for use cases such as analytics.

Multiple architectures will likely exist for a long time, and not everyone will incorporate the public cloud identically. While we are excited to argue the benefits of public cloud, serverless, containers, etc., some companies still (partially) rely on mainframe computing, as is often pointed out when discussing the hot new platform du jour. So, choice then is ultimately what we are after.

Hybridity – is that even a word?

If your ideal IT environment is best suited to have some workloads remain on-premises and consuming others from the public cloud, it is important that Rubrik does not stand in the way of such an architecture. As a software fabric that can manage data independently of its location, we free your data from the underlying infrastructure. Move from one location to another, or even between different cloud providers.

Rubrik CDM can be leveraged in a variety of environments:

  • For the on-premises datacenter, use our traditional hardware-based cluster, which optionally can connect to an archive location in the public cloud.
  • For remote offices, run a single instance of Rubrik CDM as a virtual appliance on a very moderately specced ESXi host.
  • For true “hybridity,” take an archived copy of your on-premises workload and spin that up on-demand in the public cloud, without requiring a permanent Rubrik instance in the cloud.
  • For cloud-native workloads running in either Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, run a fully-fledged Rubrik cluster in the public cloud and even replicate data from one to the other.

Remember, these are not islands of data management. Rubrik acts as a true data fabric that works as an integrated platform to manage data regardless of its location.

 

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Rolling Your Own Cloud

Maybe it turns out that your use cases are better served by an on-premises infrastructure combined with cloud computing and automation. Some benefits of this approach are on-demand consumption, unlimited scalability, and business agility. In this scenario, you are well served by a platform that has been built as an API-first architecture.

To achieve easy extensibility and integration, it is paramount that all features are exposed for easy consumption and interaction. Rubrik enables this via our RESTful API and various community-driven extensions like the PowerShell Module and VMware vRealize Orchestrator workflows.

Wherever you are in your journey, and whichever direction makes most sense for you, look for a platform that can fulfill your needs right now but is flexible enough evolve with your data center.

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