Why is Integrated Cloud Important?
Managing infrastructure is expensive because you need skilled staff who are experts on the technology stacks your applications need. The more technology stacks your business has, the more complex your infrastructure becomes. An integrated cloud requires you to learn only one abstracted management and deployment user interface, making IT management easier and more cost-effective.
Components of an Integrated Cloud
An integrated cloud reduces the need to self-manage IT services, creating a platform that abstracts complexity and allows businesses to focus on making differentiated cloud-based applications available to their customers. Integrated service providers handle scaling applications and provide high availability.
Services
A data management company such as Actian provides a single-user interface allowing customers to seamlessly provision databases, integration services, and utilities across multiple heterogeneous clouds.
Platforms
It also enables customers to select a cloud provider for an application by provisioning the application workload on the cloud of choice. For example, they can choose AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure without learning about the differences between the platforms. They enjoy the benefits of that cloud platform without being locked into a particular public cloud provider. If the customer has specific data that requires them to self-manage for regulatory reasons, they can provision that data to a private cloud or leverage an agent to communicate with on-premises data sources while still benefiting from reduced IT management and scalability.
Application Interfaces
For instance, application providers can create a catalog of industry applications and provide APIs to allow customers to use them from their own home-grown applications. A stock trading platform, for example, can offer pricing and filing information feeds that financial services businesses can embed into their custom dashboard apps.
Storage
Integrated cloud users can choose a wide variety of storage types, such as file systems, block storage, and key-value stores.
Compute
Boundless CPU resources are one of the cloud-computing platforms’ most significant selling points. An integrated cloud can analyze the workload and its data, allocating the best virtual CPU engine. Some workloads benefit from larger processors, while others benefit from a larger number of smaller CPUs with different cache sizes.
Benefits of an Integrated Cloud
Some of the expected benefits of it include the following:
- Lower IT infrastructure management costs. IT resources can be allocated to strategic tasks that increase revenues or profitability.
- A reduced time to market for new applications improves the vendor’s perception and brand.
- Lower customer churn as applications have reduced downtime because the business is deploying on a platform that operates at a higher level of abstraction.
- Moving to an integrated cloud frees up resources to build more competitive applications that match their core competencies.
- An integrated cloud is a foundational element in a microservices architecture encompassing any cloud platform.
- An integrated cloud platform consumes operational budgets without surprise capital expenditures due to poor capacity management.
Deploying Next-Generation Applications
In the early days of computing, low-level applications were written to be executed on specific hardware using proprietary programming languages. Over time, applications have become increasingly portable across hardware. Virtualization and containerization have encapsulated the computing stack with the application program. Integrated cloud has been an enabler of multi-cloud computing, rapidly becoming the norm for large enterprises and startups needing deployment flexibility.
Applications have evolved from being monolithic to being refactored into more modular components. Coupling application components with cloud APIs and integrated cloud platforms opens the door to applications that can run on any infrastructure.
Serverless computing is a natural evolution in which application builders can deploy services with little regard for the IT infrastructure other than security.
Actian and Integrated Cloud
The Actian Data Platform provides an integrated cloud by giving users a single high-level user interface to deploy database instances across hybrid, multi-cloud platforms. Data preparation uses built-in connections to hundreds of data sources, orchestration, and scheduling from a single management console interface. Connection to all business intelligence (BI) solutions provides an end-to-end data management solution with low administration and centralized control. Security capabilities include using existing authentication, SSO services, and data encryption at rest and in transit. Sensitive data can be kept on-premise using a private network. Data masking features provide additional protection for data subject to GDPR, HIPPA and PCI DSS regulations.
The Actian Data Platform delivers industry-leading analytic performance thanks to parallel vector processing and columnar storage. Multiple independent benchmarks have verified the Actian price-performance advantages. Get started with a free trial by signing up here.