Hybrid Cloud Analytics – Don’t be Cloud-Washed

Hybrid Cloud
Analytics – Don’t be Cloud-Washed

Julian Quinn, Regional Vice President, Qlik APAC

Not surprisingly, with all the momentum in
hybrid cloud infrastructure, we’re starting to hear the term “Hybrid Cloud
Analytics” pop up in the modern Business Intelligence (BI) market. However,
it’s a term that is being overused and misunderstood as those in the industry
seek to align with the latest trend.  We
see the future value of hybrid cloud computing as helping to empower customers
to embrace a cloud strategy of their own versus having it dictated to them by a
vendor.

A hybrid cloud environment is defined by
the customer. What do I mean by that? I mean that a hybrid cloud solution
should not dictate where or which cloud the customer must use with their
on-premise installation.  Although this
point should seem obvious, some large vendors in the space are ignoring this
critical point, as they dictate choices based on their (lack of) capabilities.

There’s a lot of confusion about what is
possible with hybrid cloud analytics so I will offer to clarify what hybrid is,
and what it’s not. I will break down into 3 parts:

Cloud – a delivery mechanism, not a
solution

I’m surprised by the number of market
entrants that were born in the cloud, and use that as their core
differentiation. Cloud computing is a delivery vehicle. Simple visualizations
of data via the cloud are not going to drive business value. As the pioneer and
leader in the modern BI market, we’ve learned that customers need both a broad
and deep analytical approach to better visualize, explore and understand their
data.  This is important to become more
informed, gain new insights and make better decisions to derive real business value through
analytics. Having a dumbed-down analytics solution that is delivered via the
cloud is just going to keep you behind your competition.  Having said that, we do see value in cloud
delivery of world-class analytics, which many customers currently deploy on
their own private clouds.

Hybrid – a hybrid approach to analytics
just makes sense

Today, companies need a choice of
deployment options, whether on-premise or in a private cloud leveraging the
infrastructure of their choice.  They get
to choose where they want analytics to run.

However, the truth is that an either-or
choice does not truly represent where the vast majority of customers are today
in their IT investments, and where they plan to be over time. Most customers
that we talk to have both data and applications that run on-premise, behind
their firewall, as well as data and applications that both originate and run in
the cloud.

 The
world is not black and white; it has many shades of grey. That’s why a true
hybrid approach is required to help support both where customers are today, as
well as help them migrate more of their workloads off-premise over time as they
so choose. A hybrid cloud approach to analytics is key to enabling a customers’
cloud strategy vs. dictating it.  This is
why the trend is pointing toward hybrid cloud analytics.

Hybrid Cloud Analytics – Full
centralized control of all data, wherever it resides

The simple definition of hybrid cloud
is a computing environment that uses a mix of on-premise, private cloud, and/or
public cloud infrastructure to deliver services, with orchestration between the
platforms.  This could be hybrid cloud
joins multiple clouds – or on-premise installations with cloud-based
installations. Under that general definition, many vendors will claim “hybrid
cloud analytics” in their marketing verbiage. Although being able to publish an
analytical application (or sheet for some) from an on-premise installation to a
cloud offering could be valuable, it is not hybrid cloud analytics.

Where the data resides in a true hybrid cloud analytics solution
should not matter to the user who could access it from any device based on
their role and security permissions. A properly governed solution allows you to
define rules around where data and/or the analysis on that data can be stored
or run – you can create enforcement rules on where things can and will reside
based on the sensitivity and security of that dataset. It should be easy to
manage user entitlements and licensing between the platforms. A hybrid cloud
analytics solution must allow for bi-directional migration to/from one
infrastructure environment to another and should be managed as one, seamless
environment across infrastructure boundaries via a single console.