Defying Data Gravity: Vertical Cloud Computing, Hybrid Tools and Usage Rights – JD Supra

The last decade saw explosive growth in enterprise migration to the cloud, a trend driven by the promise of lower overhead costs and greater scalability. Given this, many have made the leap and moved both non-mission-critical workloads and mission-critical functionality into the cloud.

This is where data gravity, a phrase coined by Dave McCrory comes into play. Data gravity is the effect that attracts large sets of data or highly active applications/services to other large sets of data or highly active applications/services, the same way gravity attracts planets or stars. So, in the simplest terms, data gravity is the idea that increasing volumes of data can cause data to function like an anchor, making it increasingly difficult to move as the data in question continues to increase.

The Drawbacks to a Data Gravity WellAs Principal Research Analyst Eric Hanselman at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, explains it: For enterprises storing their data and applications in a cloud environment, if the growing data takes place in public or private clouds that are not easily accessible by the enterprise using them, the full value of that data cant be realized, and the enterprise will be trapped into spending exorbitant sums to free it. Unrestrained, data gravity can lead to limited innovation, poor customer and employee experiences, increased costs, information silos, compliance issues, security concerns, and slow decision-making for the enterprise.

These security and latency issues pose a special risk to enterprises in heavily regulated industries, such as health care and financial institutions, that need to ensure their IT infrastructure and capabilities meet strict compliance requirements.

Given this, a careful understanding and consideration of the nuances of data gravity presents an opportunity for enterprises to craft data-centric infrastructures and networks to capitalize on the new capabilities that might be unlocked.

Vertical Cloud Computing and Legal Strategies: A Potential Solution?Opposed to a one-size-fits-all cloud model, vertical cloud computing is a more specialized solution that allows enterprises to meet niche regulatory and market requirements. At a high level, a vertical cloud computing model is a cloud infrastructure offering designed and optimized for a specific vertical (i.e., for a particular industry). For example, last year Microsoft launched a vertical cloud offering called Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which is designed for organizations in the health care industry.

One particular benefit of the vertical cloud model is that it forges a two-way street between the enterprise and the public cloud via a fault-tolerant connection that also allows enterprises to port back applications. These direct data interconnections allow enterprises to have their data more readily accessible and controllable, allowing enterprises to circumvent some of the latency and data unavailability issues caused by data gravity.

While vertical cloud computing solutions provide a data-centric IT infrastructure optimized for a customers specific industry, there are certain risks that remain and that customers should address in their contracts with service providers. For example:

Given the enormous amounts of data that are being used and stored by todays business applications, conventional approaches to data analytics need to be reconsidered to make these volumes of data more manageable and accessible as well as compliant with various regulations. Understanding how data gravity may be impacting an organizations data will better enable that organization to improve and run its business and avoid being overwhelmed by the demands of big data and enterprise data analytics architecture.

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Defying Data Gravity: Vertical Cloud Computing, Hybrid Tools and Usage Rights - JD Supra