With 71 percent of CIOs report having a cloud-first strategy, it’s clear enterprises are doing something. But it’s also clear that no two organizations are in the same place. While some organizations have gone “all in” by moving their production workloads to the cloud, most organizations are adopting a hybrid approach in which they are:
- Building net-new next-generation applications that are built on cloud-native, non-relational database platforms, and
- Selectively moving application workloads to one or multiple clouds and back to their on-premises data center.
We at Datos IO thought we would share some of the ways in which we’ve seen organizations embrace a multicloud infrastructure strategy.
Disaster Recovery
One of the easiest ways to test the cloud and its promise of flexibility and agility is to set up your disaster recovery (DR) environment to act as a fail-safe mirror for the data in your on-premises environment. Cloud allows you to be more flexible in technology choices and offers elastic expansion of capacity. A cloud-based DR environment can be a conservative strategy to test the waters and prepare your organization. For more adventurous folks, you can think about building your DR strategy to focus on multiclouds.
Test/Dev Environments
In their journey to the cloud, many customers are trying to minimize their risk by moving test and development environments first. One way to do this is to move test/dev instant workloads for your batch analytical, integration and processing workloads. Some organizations have moved their production workloads off-premises, and could repurpose their on-premises infrastructure for test and development environments.
Cloud Bursting
As enterprises transition to the cloud, they are leveraging on-demand capabilities to transition analytical processing for peak processing hours, such as quarter-end financial reporting. In such cases, companies want to stand up an environment to offload processing and probably merge changes back to on-premises when operations are completed.
Here are a few examples of how organizations are deploying new applications in the cloud.
Data Lakes
Some organizations use the cloud as a data lake, where data of all varieties—from different databases to different applications—go to a single environment. Big data file system technologies such as Hadoop are custom-built for data lake environments and offer a cost-effective way to store and process all the data. These new applications reside in the cloud and must be protected.
 Next-Generation Mobile and Web Applications
Companies such as Netflix frequently use non-relational databases such as Cassandra and MongoDB to build new web 2.0 applications. A lot of new websites use MongoDB because of its support for objects, which works well in building a web catalog. Similarly, Cassandra is popular for applications such as web user profiles because of its ability to support distributed replication and fast write throughput.
If one wishes to build a new application for the cloud, using a non-relational database is highly recommended.
— Michael Colby
