Komprise recently made some announcements around extending its product to cloud. I had the opportunity to speak to Krishna Subramanian (President and COO) about the news and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.

The Announcement

Komprise has traditionally focused on unstructured data stored on-premises. It has now extended the capabilities of Komprise Intelligent Data Management to include cloud data. There’s currently support for Amazon S3 and Wasabi, with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM support coming soon.

Benefits

So what do you get with this capability?

Analyse data usage across cloud accounts and buckets easily

• Single view across cloud accounts, buckets, and storage classes
• Analyse AWS usage by various metrics accurately based on access times
• Explore different data archival, replication, and deletion strategies with instant cost projections

Optimise AWS costs with analytics-driven archiving

• Continuously move objects by policy across Cloud Network Attached Storage (NAS), Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Standard-IA, Amazon S3 Glacier, and Amazon S3 Glacier DeepArchive
• Minimise costs and penalties by moving data at the right time based on access patterns

Bridge to Big Data/Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects

• Create virtual data lakes for Big Data, AI – search for exactly what you need across cloud accounts and buckets
• Native access to moved data on each storage class with full data fidelity

Create Cyber Resiliency with AWS

• Copy S3 data to AWS to protect from ransomware with an air-gapped copy

[image courtesy of Komprise]

Why Is This Good?

The move to cloud storage hasn’t been all beer and skittles for enterprise. Storing large amounts of data in public cloud presents enterprises with a number of challenges, including:

• Poor visibility – “Bucket sprawl”
• Insufficient data – Cloud does not easily track last access / data use
• Cost complexity – Manual data movement can lead to unexpected retrieval cost surprises
• Labour – Manually moving data is error-prone and time-consuming

Sample Use Cases

Some other reasons you might want to have Komprise manage your data include:

• Finding ex-employee data stored in buckets.
• Data migration – you might want to take a copy of your data from Wasabi to AWS.

There’s support for all unstructured data (file and object), so the benefits of Komprise can be enjoyed regardless of how you’re storing your unstructured data. It’s also important to note that there’s no change to the existing licensing model, you’re just now able to use the product on public cloud storage.

Thoughts

Effective data management remains a big challenge for enterprises. It’s no secret that public cloud storage is really just storage that lives in another company’s data centre. Sure, it might be object storage, rather than file based, but it’s still just a bunch of unstructured data sitting in another company’s data centre. The way you consume that data may have changed, and certainly the way you pay for it has changed, but fundamentally it’s still your unstructured data sitting on a share or a filesystem. The problems you had on-premises though, still manifest in public cloud environments (i.e. data sprawl, capacity issues, etc). That’s why the Komprise solution seems so compelling when it comes to managing your on-premises storage consumption, and extending that capability to cloud storage is a no-brainer. When it comes to storing unstructured data, it’s frequently a bin fire of some sort or another. The reason for this is because it doesn’t scale well. I don’t mean the storage doesn’t scale – you can store petabytes all over the place if you like. But if you’re still hand crafting your shares and manually moving data around, you’ll notice that it becomes more and more time consuming as time goes on (and your data storage needs grow).

One way to address this challenge is to introduce a level of automation, which is something that Komprise does quite well. If you’ve got many terabytes of data stored on-premises and in AWS buckets (or you’re looking to move some old data from on-premises to the cloud) and you’re not quite sure what it’s all for or how best to go about it, Komprise can certainly help you out.