So much of the discussion about hybrid cloud is focused on moving workloads from data centers to the cloud (typically public cloud, but also managed cloud services). This makes intuitive sense: the cloud offers flexibility and simplicity of services that can be easily scaled up and down as needed. The most compelling reason is that you only pay for what you use. Let’s face it, you can do things in the cloud that you could never imagine doing in a data center.
Migration to the Cloud and Returning Workloads On-Premises
But the cloud is not a panacea. This is why the answers found in Veeam’s Cloud Protection Trends Report for 2023 in regards to the question “has your organization brought any workloads back from public cloud-host to on-premises?” are so revealing.
An overwhelming number of companies that were surveyed (88%), repatriated workloads from the cloud back to their on-premises datacenter.
As you see from this graphic, there are three main use cases for bringing workloads back on-premises:
- Development in the cloud, production on-premises (this is the use case showcased in Cisco’s recent demonstration video of Kasten K10 hybrid cloud application mobility)
- Bringing production back on-premises after running disaster recovery in the cloud
- Returning workloads back on-premises after migrating them to the cloud
If your organization is like the vast majority of those surveyed, you will want to consider IT vendors with solutions that embrace flexible and secure hybrid cloud computing. Veeam and Cisco are industry leaders with comprehensive solutions to secure, automate, protect, and provide data and application mobility across a hybrid cloud enterprise. This is true for not only traditional workloads like bare metal servers and virtual machines, but also for container-based applications running on Kubernetes.
One other topic from the Veeam Cloud Protection Trends Report for 2023 that deserves mentioning has to do with backup retention for the workloads running in the cloud. The report found that while nearly all organizations have long-term retention (greater than one year) requirements, half of those organizations are not applying those policies to their cloud-hosted data. The report predicts this will change as compliance and legal teams become aware of this major data protection gap.
Even with half of the surveyed organizations not applying long-term retention mandates to their cloud-hosted data, more than a third (38%) were using their data center to backup their cloud-hosted data for long-term retention. For many years, Veeam and Cisco customers have been deploying Cisco UCS servers, like the S3260, for their on-premises backup retention requirements. This proven backup infrastructure solution should be considered if, like the surveyed organizations, you prefer to keep your long-term backup retention for cloud-hosted data in the same trusted environment you use for your datacenter backup retention requirements.
Veeam and Cisco Resources for Hybrid Cloud Data Management
Veeam and Cisco’s commitment to enabling customer hybrid cloud goals is detailed in two recent documents. The first is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) titled “Cisco HyperFlex with Red Hat OCP and Kasten by Veeam for Hybrid Cloud”. The second is a Veeam solution brief titled Better enable Cisco Hybrid Cloud with Veeam Data Platform. Both documents demonstrate Veeam and Cisco’s ability to secure, automate, protect, and easily move workloads across hybrid cloud platforms without the risk of malicious malware, like ransomware, or lock-in to any particular hybrid cloud platform.
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