Data Management for a Hybrid World: Platform Components and Scalability

For most companies, a mixture of both on-premises and cloud environments called hybrid cloud is becoming the norm. This is the second blog in a two-part series describing data management strategies that businesses and IT need to be successful in their new hybrid cloud world. The previous post covered hybrid cloud data management, data residency, and compliance. 

Platform Components

There are essential components for enabling hybrid cloud data analytics. First, you need data integration that can access data from all data sources. Your data integration tool needs a high degree of data quality management and transformation to convert raw data into a validated and usable format. Second, you should have the ability to orchestrate pipelines to coordinate and manage integration processes in a systematic and automated way. Third, you need a consistent data fabric layer that can be deployed across all environments and clouds to guarantee interoperability, consistency, and performance. The data fabric layer must have the ability to ingest different types of data as well. Last, you’ll need to transform data into formats and orchestrate pipelines. 

Scaling Hybrid Cloud Investments

There are several costs to consider for hybrid cloud such as licensing, hardware, administration, and staff skill sets. Software as a Service (SaaS) and public cloud services tend to be subscription-based consumption models that are an Operational Expense (Opex). While on-premises and private cloud deployments are generally software licensing agreements that are a Capital Expenditure (Capex), subscription software models are great for starting small, but the costs can increase quickly. Alternatively, the upfront cost for traditional software is larger but your costs are generally fixed, pending growth. 

Beyond software and licensing costs, scalability is a factor. Cloud services and SaaS offerings provide on-demand scale. Whereas on-premises deployments and products can also scale to a certain point, but eventually may require additional hardware (scale-up) and additional nodes (scale-out). Additionally, these deployments often need costly over-provisioning to meet peak demand.  

For proprietary and high-risk data assets, leveraging on-premises deployments tends to be a consistent choice for obvious reasons. You have full control of managing the environment. It is worth noting that your technical staff needs to have strong security skills to protect on-premises data assets. On-premises environments rarely need infinite scale and sensitive data assets have minimal year-over-year growth. For low and medium-risk data assets, leveraging public cloud environments is quite common including multi-cloud topologies. Typically, these data assets are more varied in nature and larger in volume which makes them ideal for the cloud. You can leverage public cloud services and SaaS offerings to process, store, and query these assets. Utilizing multi-cloud strategies can provide additional benefits for higher SLA environments and disaster recovery use cases. 

Hybrid Data Management Made Easy

The Actian Data Platform is a hybrid and multi-cloud data platform for today’s modern data management requirements. The Actian platform provides a universal data fabric for all modern computing environments. Data engineers leverage a low-code and no-code set of data integration tools to process and transform data across environments. The data platform provides a modern and highly efficient data warehouse service that scales on-demand or manually using a scheduler. Data engineers and administrators can configure idle sleep and shutdown procedures as well. This feature is critical as it greatly reduces cloud data management costs and resource consumption.  

The Actian platform supports popular third-party data integration tools leveraging standard ODBC and JDBC connectivity. Data scientists and analysts are empowered to use popular third-party data science and business intelligence tool sets with standard connectivity options. It also contains best-in-class security features to support and assist with regulatory compliance. In addition to that, the data platform’s key security features include management and data plane network isolation, industry-grade encryption, including at-rest and in-flight, IP allow lists, and modern access controls. Customers can easily customize Actian Data Platform deployments based on their unique security requirements. 

The Actian Data Platform components are fully managed services when run in public cloud environments and self-managed when deployed on-premises, giving you the best of both worlds. Additionally, we are bringing to market a transactional database as a service component to provide additional value across the data management spectrum for our valued customers. The result is a highly scalable and consumable, consistent data fabric for modern hybrid cloud analytics.