Five Critical Questions to Ask Before Moving Data to the Cloud
The emergence of Big Data has presented Liaison Technologies, a provider of data management and integration services delivered via the cloud, with both an opportunity and a challenge: to offer holistic data management in the cloud. To that end, the company has partnered with MapR Technologies to embed a distribution of Hadoop inside its ALLOY cloud platform.
Manish Gupta, chief marketing officer for Liaison Technologies, says that the ALLOY platform itself is based on a microservices and polyglot persistence architecture that enables it to incorporate multiple data repositories. The addition of support for the MapR distribution of Hadoop, says Gupta, means that IT organizations can invoke a data repository within the context of a larger data management framework that is exposed via the cloud instead of having to invest in the IT infrastructure required to deploy and manage those data repositories on premise.
Gupta says that as Big Data and cloud computing evolves, IT organizations are realizing that they need a framework for managing data that goes beyond simply trying to acquire individual parts. As such, he says Liaison Technologies is betting there will be a major shift in where the center of data gravity in the enterprise will lie. As that shift occurs, Liaison Technologies expects to provide the management and integration services required to bridge data repositories running in the cloud and on premise.
In the case of Liaison, Gupta says this means that all the cloud computing focus concerning infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service environments will soon be superseded by data platform-as-a-service (dPaaS) services such as ALLOY.
While most IT organizations don’t yet have a comprehensive cloud computing strategy in place, it’s only a matter of time before the focus of the conversation moves to data management. For all intents and purposes, IT organizations have come to accept that they need to manage semi-autonomous islands of IT infrastructure. Though at the moment, it’s not clear just how the management of data will one day actually be federated across all those islands of enterprise computing.
