Data Virtualization and the Cloud

Unleashing the Power of Your Data with the Cloud Virtualization

Virtualization

Most organizations are drowning in data. Data resides in tens or hundreds of corporate data silos across both on-premises and cloud repositories, making it much more difficult to find, access, share, analyze, and extract meaningful insights from your organization’s most important asset - data. This is where cloud data virtualization comes in as a potential game-changer.

What is cloud data virtualization?

Cloud data virtualization is a long-established technology that enables companies to create a virtual management layer on top of all their disparate data sources, regardless of location or data format. This virtual layer acts as a single point of access (and management), providing users with a simplified and unified view of all their corporate data.

Companies have used data virtualization for many years to simplify their complex on-prem storage resources. With the continuing adoption of cloud services, organizations are looking for the same or more functionality to manage their growing cloud storage environments.

What is Cloud Data Virtualization

Cloud data virtualization is a technology that provides a unified view of your data stored in your organization’s numerous cloud repositories. Much like the on-premises storage virtualization technologies, cloud data virtualization essentially creates a virtual layer on top of your various cloud data sources, acting as a single point of access and management. This eliminates the need to physically move or copy data, making it a flexible and cost-effective way to access and analyze information.

Note: Some cloud data virtualization solutions (like restorVault) can virtualize and manage data across both on-premises and cloud repositories, simplifying your total enterprise storage requirements.

There are several benefits of using cloud data virtualization

Adopting cloud data virtualization solutions offers many advantages over traditional data integration approaches. 

Increased agility and flexibility: Cloud data Virtualization enables companies to quickly access and analyze data from any source without requiring complex and risky data movement or integration projects. This agility allows companies to react to business changes faster and make real-time data-driven decisions. 

Reduced costs and complexity: Cloud data Virtualization eliminates the need for complex and costly data migration and search processes. It also reduces the complexity of managing multiple data sources and integrations.

Enhanced performance and scalability: Cloud data virtualization platforms are designed to efficiently handle extremely large data volumes and complex queries. This allows companies to scale data analytics efforts as needed without worrying about performance bottlenecks,

Improved data governance and security: Cloud data virtualization provides centralized control over sensitive data (such as personally identifiable information (PII), making enforcing security and data privacy policies and regulatory compliance requirements easier.

Faster response time for uncovering insights and decision-making: With Cloud Data Virtualization, you can access and analyze your data in minutes, not days or weeks. This rapid access to insights allows companies to identify trends, make informed decisions, and improve business outcomes.

Protection from ransomware and extortionware: Virtualized cloud data can defend against ransomware/extortionware data corruption and deletion, especially if the virtualized data is encrypted and written to immutable media.

Cloud data virtualization spans geographies, industries, and regulations

Cloud data virtualization addresses a universal corporate challenge – simplifying data storage and management as enterprises expand beyond on-prem data centers. These solution benefits can be realized across various industries and use cases. 

Cloud-based analytics and business intelligence: Cloud data virtualization provides a single point of access for all your data, making it easy to run ad hoc queries, generate reports, and visualize trends. 

Big data and data lakes in the cloud: Cloud data virtualization allows you to analyze large amounts of unstructured data stored in data lakes without the need to move or transform the data. 

Cloud-native applications and microservices: Cloud data virtualization enables data sharing and access between microservices, promoting a more agile and scalable application development environment. 

Cloud-based collaboration and data sharing: Cloud data virtualization facilitates secure and controlled data sharing between different organizational departments and users. 

Data duplication: Data virtualization allows organizations to migrate or duplicate virtualized data (file systems) to additional or alternate data repositories such as cloud platforms, different data centers, and SharePoint Online file shares.

One obvious use case includes duplicating virtualized data file systems to alternate secure repositories for access by outside counsel and eDiscovery providers.

Disaster recovery and backup: Virtualized storage enables efficient data backup and replication across multiple cloud locations, ensuring data availability and minimizing downtime in case of disasters.

Hybrid cloud deployments: Storage virtualization bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud storage, enabling seamless data access, movement, and workload migration between environments.

The future of cloud data virtualization

Cloud data virtualization is a rapidly evolving technology with immense potential to revolutionize data management, protection, and disaster recovery. Some key solution trends to watch out for include: 

• AI and ML-powered data governance and security: Advanced AI and ML cloud-based technologies will automate data governance tasks, detect and prevent security threats, and improve data quality.

• Integration with data lakes and data mesh architectures: Cloud data virtualization will be crucial in providing unified access and governance to data distributed across various data repositories. 

• Automated data provisioning and orchestration: Cloud data virtualization will be tightly integrated with cloud orchestration platforms to automate the provisioning and management of data resources.

• Easy self-service data access: Cloud data virtualization will empower business users to access, utilize, and analyze data without relying on IT teams, fostering a data-driven culture within organizations. 

• Cost control and reduction: Cloud data virtualization will reduce storage costs by allowing fast, cost-efficient, and policy-driven migration to lower-cost storage tiers – both cloud and on-prem.

• Integration with emerging data management technologies: Cloud data virtualization will be integrated with emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain.

Data virtualization use cases

Data virtualization is a technology that has played a pivotal role in helping organizations integrate data from various sources, centralize security, manage data across repositories, and deliver faster insights. However, the concept of data virtualization wasn’t traditionally designed for the cloud-native landscape.

There are numerous well-known use cases for storage virtualization in the cloud covering a wide range of business needs and industries. Some of the most common use cases include:

1. Cloud-native applications: Virtualized storage allows developers to provision and scale storage resources dynamically as needed, supporting the agile and flexible nature of cloud-native applications.

2. Big data and analytics: Storage virtualization facilitates the efficient storage and management of large datasets in big data and analytics workloads. It enables seamless scaling and data access across distributed clusters.

3. Dev/Test environments: Virtualization provides cost-effective and scalable storage for development and testing environments, allowing teams to quickly provision and tear down environments without worrying about underlying storage hardware.

4. Disaster recovery and backup: Virtualized storage enables efficient data backup and replication across multiple cloud locations, ensuring compliant data availability and minimizing downtime in case of disasters.

5. Hybrid cloud deployments: Storage virtualization bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud storage, enabling seamless data movement and workload migration between environments.

6. Healthcare and life sciences: Healthcare providers and life sciences companies often deal with sensitive, regulated, and sensitive data. Virtualized storage can include secure and compliant storage solutions and processes that meet stringent industry standards.

7. E-commerce and retail: Virtualized storage helps e-commerce and retail businesses handle seasonal fluctuations in storage demand and provides customers with a seamless online shopping experience.

8. Manufacturing and industrial automation: Manufacturing and industrial automation processes often generate large amounts of data. Virtualized storage provides the scalability and performance needed to manage and analyze this data effectively.

9. Small and medium businesses (SMBs): For SMBs, virtualized storage offers a cost-effective and flexible way to manage storage needs without investing in expensive hardware and software.

10. Data duplication: virtualized data can be duplicated to other geographies and systems for additional security, regulatory compliance, and easier access.

11. Cost savings: Using hierarchical storage management concepts (HSM), inactive files from tier-one storage resources can be automatically moved to less expensive storage tiers (on-prem and cloud) for cost-saving realization.

12. eDiscovery data set managed access: Providing a stand-alone and highly secure eDiscovery data repository for outside counsel and eDiscovery service provider access and ongoing work will add additional levels of data security and continuous auditing and reporting.

As cloud-based data storage and management continues to expand in size, scale, and complexity, some businesses have struggled to keep up with industry best practices without the proper tools and processes built specifically for the cloud, including data virtualization.

restorVault storage virtualization solutions

restorVault has been a leader in enterprise storage virtualization solutions for many years and has been awarded several US patents that take data virtualization to new levels. restorVault’s storage virtualization solutions provide organizations with several benefits, including:

1. Enhanced storage utilization and simplified data management capabilities

2. Improved data availability and resilience

3. Simplified scalability and flexibility

4. Hybrid virtualization capability across both on-prem and cloud platforms

5. Cost efficiency and investment protection

6. Data protection against disasters and ransomware attacks (data encryption and immutable storage tiers)

7. And the ability to duplicate, move, and share large, unstructured data sets without the need for time-consuming and risky large-scale data migrations

restorVault’s Storage virtualization solution replaces files (based on policies) in an on-prem or cloud active repository, such as a file share, with a pointer or virtual data file that points to the original file in the encrypted and immutable restorVault cloud.  Whenever a user clicks on a virtual data file in their file explorer, the actual file is instantly retrieved from the restorVault cloud platform for viewing and ongoing work.

This storage virtualization into the immutable restorVault trusted cloud repository also eliminates the wasteful need for numerous backups of inactive data.

Additionally, restorVault data virtualization frees up large amounts of costly tier 1 enterprise storage for priority use by active data.

With your inactive files stored and managed in a secure, trusted, and inexpensive cloud repository, your enterprise backups will be approximately 80% smaller. This enables you to restore data faster and free up costly enterprise storage.

For every TB of restorVault virtual cloud storage, you could recoup 80% from primary, backup, and other cloud platform storage.

Contact us today to learn how restorVault can help your company save money by virtualizing and managing inactive data while increasing data security, regulatory compliance, and storage capacity!