One of the first use cases that most organizations have for the cloud involves some form of data protection. Rather than invest in a massive amount of infrastructure to house data that will be rarely accessed, many organizations prefer to take advantage of low-cost cloud services.
With that in mind, Quantum Corp. today extended its support for AWS with the release of Q-Cloud Protect, a virtual data deduplication appliance that serves to reduce the amount of data that organizations host on AWS. As a monthly service, Eric Bassier, director of product marketing for Quantum, says that unless AWS is actively managed, the amount of data on the cloud service can grow rapidly. Over time, the cost of hosting that data on AWS grows as well. Q-Cloud Protect is designed to reduce the amount of data on AWS by working with other data protection software from Quantum on AWS to identify data that is duplicated, says Bassier.
Bassier notes that over an extended period of time, storing data on AWS and other public clouds can wind up being more expensive than hosting it locally. For that reason, many organizations prefer to archive data in a public cloud, while using data protection software to store a copy of their more recent and important data locally. That hybrid cloud approach frequently eliminates the need to access data in AWS in all but the most dire of disaster recovery scenarios, says Bassier. That’s critical because while storing data in AWS is relatively inexpensive, accessing that data remotely over the network is an expensive proposition. More challenging still, the amount of time it can take to pull data down from the cloud probably exceeds most organizations’ recovery time objectives.
Longer term, Bassier says Quantum is looking at adding support for a high-speed data replication appliance, dubbed Snowball, developed by AWS to help reduce the time and cost associated with transferring data in and out of the cloud. In addition, Bassier says Quantum is looking at adding support for other public clouds, including Microsoft Azure and Google Engine.
As cloud computing continues to evolve, IT organizations are clearly now fairly comfortable with relying on cloud services as an element of their overall data protection strategy. The challenge now is finding the best way to go about implementing a data protection strategy in an IT world that is increasingly defined by the rise of hybrid cloud computing.