FEATURE STORY // CLOUDERA
Cloudera Data Platform Incorporates Four Key Attributes of Data Architecture In conversation with Enterprise IT World, Vinod Ganesan, Country Manager, Cloudera elaborates on the scope of the multicloud adoption in the Indian market and how the functionality of Cloudera Data Platform that has a Hybrid & Multicloud Support, is Multifunctional, conforms to Security & Governance and supports Open standards offers a unique offering.
W
ith the enterprise market embarking on a Digital Transformation journey, the business requirements are evolving and technology providers are responding to the changing demands by revolutionizing their offerings. . Multicloud Scenario in the Indian Market The biggest challenge which Indians faced was the law of the land. The strong data sovereignty concept, i.e. Data cannot leave the country was a complication. So, till a couple of years ago, public cloud was a big challenge because all the giants who operated in this space never had data centers in India. But over the last two years, that has changed tremendously. Now with multiple tiers four data centers set up across the country, the biggest challenge of sovereignty which didn’t allow people to adopt public cloud has been rectified. There is a very strong propensity amongst the enterprise customers to start looking at public cloud adoption. A lot of people look at cloud from cost perspective, believing it to be a cost-effective alternative. However, it is actually dependent on the function of the workload that is being run. For example, a persistent workload which runs every day for eight hours and consumes a fixed set of resources, when moved to a public cloud, would actually be
26 ENTERPRISE IT WORLD NOVEMBER 2019
more expensive compared to running it in-house. Taking into account the increasing market demand for a comprehensive Data Cloud Platform, Cloudera has released its platform in the Indian market. The offering constitutes of the baseline for the fundamental data architecture that is required for organizations to transform. These unique key attributes are - Hybrid and Multicloud Support, Multifunctional, Security & Governance and Open Source. Hybrid and Multicloud Support This is the main ingredient which lends the agility that organizations are looking for in their data transformation journey. Multifunctional Different businesses come with their own requirements. In order to service them you need to have the capability to run different types of workloads on the same platform. For example, somebody might come with the operational data warehouse or an AI-ML based use case. Each of these workloads actually puts a very different type of pressure on the underlying architecture. Previously everything was being dealt separately. Everybody had their own environments, which created a lot of silos. Now, customers are demanding a single platform that can typically run and enable all these use cases. This brings in the multifunction aspect of the platform.
Security and Governance There is a classic conflict between business and IT. Business expects IT to work at a particular pace in terms of launching new initiatives or analyzing certain segment and coming back with what opportunity exists there. And rightly so, because in today’s world, that window of opportunities is open for a very limited time. So if you don’t capitalize within that window, you would have lost that advantage. So, they put a lot of pressure for IT to support these initiatives. IT in its own sense is plagued by the challenges associated with security and governance. They cannot compromise on these values because obviously it has far-fetching consequences. The value of data is compromised. So they are not able to turn around at the pace at which business wants them to go. So, some businesses find themselves turning to a public cloud provider or wherever and try to run this particular initiative. This creates a shadow IT where there are inherent security and risk associated with that kind of an approach. So, IT is being increasingly seen as what keeps the organization in sync. How do you now enable security and governance provided that one consistent framework, irrespective of where your data is? The moment you say hybrid and multicloud capabilities, there is a necessity to have these capabilities without compromising on the underlying security, which becomes the third fundamental premise.