Building a technology layer based on cloud computing data

Modern enterprise business consists of a complex set of application stacks that cover a wide variety of virtual machines, physical servers, and proprietary storage hardware. Its technology stack, SaaS provider, and a large number of applications extend from corporate headquarters to branch offices and remote offices, and across the company's overseas facilities around the world.

Nowadays, new technologies are emerging one after another, but they have not simply replaced the previous technologies, but the technology of layer stacking has accumulated into a technology stack, and people only build top-level technologies through long-term incremental decision-making and implementation. For many people, the mainframe is still being migrated to the client-server layer of the data center. Prior to virtualization and server consolidation, Web technologies added SaaS beyond the data center, reorganizing everything into more manageable chunks of data.

Mobile computing, the Internet of Things, and regulatory restrictions on data retention have all contributed to the rapid growth of data, making it increasingly difficult to understand, manage, and protect everything. Big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are creating more layers when people adopt cloud computing. People may refer to these levels as archaeological techniques. A typical enterprise has many such technical layers, as shown in the following figure:

Over time, the graduality of deploying these layers of technology is what users call "hairball architecture." That is to say, people end up with a large number of data islands and applications, which will inevitably lead to vendor lock-in, increased maintenance costs, and reduced business agility, as complex levels must be interconnected to handle changing Business processes and growing demand.

The findings suggest that this complexity is considered an obstacle, which is not surprising.

Embrace complexity

The emergence of every new technology layer is highly publicized, and change is the only real constant. Companies need to be agile for innovation and competition. When PricewaterhouseCoopers surveyed 246 CEOs, 75% of them believe that innovation is more important than the operational efficiency of business success, and organizations must be able to adopt new tools or services at any time. Innovation.

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, said: "The current market competition is no longer that big fish eat small fish, but fast fish eat slow fish."

Now is the time for people to accept every new technology layer and add value to the business. New applications will continue to be developed, new cloud computing services will need to be integrated, new partners will join, mergers and acquisitions, and these are inevitable, and archaeological excavations of technology will continue. The question is where do people go from? How do people develop these key technology layers to increase business agility, reduce costs, and gain the freedom to re-innovate?

Entering the era of cloud computing

The transition to a cloudy environment is going smoothly, and more new levels of technology will follow. According to research firm Gartner, by 2020, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities. Although only 40% of McKinsey's surveys have a workload of more than 10% on public cloud platforms, 80% said they plan to achieve this within three years.

As more and more companies migrate their technology to a hybrid deployment of the SaaS platform and the public cloud, complexity remains a problem. But cloud computing is a combination of virtual computing and platform services that is backward compatible and forward-looking, that is, it can adapt to existing workloads and make it easier to create new services and applications.

Digital transformation is challenging for all the compelling business advantages it may offer, and there is no easy way to overcome these complexities. But if it's like peeling onions, people will find a common element in their core data. It is impossible for an enterprise to rewrite all applications, convert all data, and simultaneously expand the hairball structure.

Data is the foundation of the business

As enterprise business moves to cloud computing services and off-the-shelf scalable infrastructure, data becomes more and more valuable and has become a way for companies to achieve differentiated competition. For many companies, collecting, managing, and analyzing large amounts of data is critical. If artificial intelligence is to be implemented, companies must develop the ability to process and apply it. Companies that successfully master and leverage their business data will be good at and get a return on their investment in data. And some people think that processing data will be a cost and will not bring commercial value.

Achieving the diversity and integration of cloudy and hybrid clouds is costly, time-critical, or even impossible without an appropriate data strategy. People cannot allow data to be bundled and isolated in platform-specific "storage" devices. To take full advantage of cloud computing as a combination of virtual computing and platform services, people must set up data for free and access it where it is needed without compromising its integrity and security.

If the data layer is virtualized, it becomes flexible enough to quickly and easily adapt to the new cloudy environment. Enterprise building real-time control of data will enable rapid construction of hybrid clouds, IoT integration, and consolidation across multiple clouds. To achieve this, companies need to plan carefully because many common cloud computing data management pitfalls need to be avoided.

Companies need to create a virtualized cloudy data foundation, build their own new technology layers, and leverage existing layers to provide enterprises with the stable foundation needed for true business agility.