{"id":8231,"date":"2019-07-06T10:13:58","date_gmt":"2019-07-06T00:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=8231"},"modified":"2019-07-06T10:14:03","modified_gmt":"2019-07-06T00:14:03","slug":"the-perfect-cloud-environment-is-the-perfect-headache-for-data-protection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2019\/07\/06\/the-perfect-cloud-environment-is-the-perfect-headache-for-data-protection\/","title":{"rendered":"The Perfect Cloud Environment is the Perfect Headache for Data Protection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It practically goes without saying that the smartest way to move workloads to a public cloud is to have them completely refactored to run as a SaaS based application. At that point you’re paying for the application and its data services, nothing more and nothing less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, you can lift-and-shift your virtual infrastructure. Taking an application running on a virtual machine that’s designed to basically soak resources (because you’ve already purchased the server, right?) and plonking it into IaaS is the fastest and most efficient way to blow a yearly IT budget in a quarter or less. It’s been done.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a variety of different Cloud operating models of course, but the pinnacle in terms of simplicity, the alpha and the omega of the Cloud world, is Software as a Service. And it’s a looming headache of gargantuan proportions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Growth of SaaS is Not Without Its Challenges<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Simon Sharwood at CRN Australia reports:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australia’s “cloud” market is mostly software-as-a-service, says analyst house IDC.<\/p>

The firm’s new tracker of Australian cloud services revenue from 2016 to 2018 found that revenue in [sic] reached $4.01 billion in 2018, 30.6 percent year-on-year growth.<\/p>“Australian cloud is 66 percent SaaS: IDC”<\/a><\/strong>, Simon Sharwood, July 4 2019, CRN Australia<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Simon goes on to describe that SaaS represented 65.8% of that spend – rounded to 66% for the headline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blissfully, which bills itself as providing tools to track and manage SaaS usage within organisations, provides reports on adoption rates (2018 Q1<\/a>, 2019<\/a>), which provide some interesting insights into SaaS utilisation. Nuggets from the 2019 annual report include<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  • “In 2018, the average company spent $343,000 on SaaS, a 78% increase from the previous year”<\/em><\/li>
  • SaaS spend had increased year on year, every year over 5 years, for all tracked company sizes (0-50 employees, 51-100 employees, 101-200 employees, 201-500 employees, 501-1000 employees, 1000+ employees).<\/li>
  • The average<\/em> cost per employee of SaaS subscriptions was $2,884 (presumably USD).<\/li>
  • On average almost regardless of numbers of employees, each employee used around 8 SaaS applications.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    In their 2018 State of Enterprise Cloud Computing, Forbes noted (reporting data from an IDG study):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    30% of all IT budgets are allocated to cloud computing this year, with the majority being SaaS (48%) … the average investment is soaring in cloud computing apps and platforms, with the average reaching $2.2M this year, up from $1.62M in 2016.<\/p>“State of Enterprise Cloud Computing, 2018”<\/a><\/strong>, Louis Columbus, 30 August 2018, Forbes<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    A listing of the biggest SaaS companies is like a who’s who of tech darlings, including Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Tableau (now purchased by Salesforce), Zendesk, Mulesoft and of course, Office 365 services these days represent a huge SaaS footprint, and a common starting point for businesses as they look towards handing the back-end administration of email over to someone else<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Yet here’s the rub: every SaaS application you deploy adds to the complexity you’ll have when it comes to tracking and managing your data protection. There is no escaping this<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Whenever something is running on-premises, there’s always a way to provide data protection services for it. Somehow. For a start, you might accept for the fast RTO and short RPO the risk of crash-consistency and do snapshots and replication. For backups, even if there’s a database involved you’ll find a way to achieve that backup: if it’s a traditional big-name database vendor, there’s probably a database module or plugin for it, and if not, there’s other ways to deal with it such as pre\/post processing, data dumps, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    SaaS of course changes that picture. Your classic service model diagram looks like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    On-Premises vs In-Cloud Access Levels – Highlighted Blocks are ‘out of your control’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    I liken SaaS to NAS. NAS is practically ubiquitous within IT Infrastructure circles, making it easy to present enterprise grade storage and services, but coming with a data protection headache. In fact, SaaS is sticky like NAS, too. Returning to the CRN article, Simon Sharwood quoted IDC as saying:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    “Organisations are also aware that deployed SaaS solutions can become sticky. SaaS applications often require complex integrations with on-premise [sic] <\/em>software to avoid information silos across the cloud and on-premise [sic]<\/em>. This means the organisation cannot quickly or cheaply switch even if a more innovative SaaS application appears.”<\/p> “Australian cloud is 66 percent SaaS: IDC”<\/a><\/strong>, Simon Sharwood, July 4 2019, CRN Australia <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    In short: SaaS makes things really simple, but there’s a high chance of you becoming a bit of a data hostage once you’ve got your workload converted to running in a SaaS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    There aren’t just hundreds of SaaS applications out there, there aren’t just thousands of SaaS applications out there — you’re looking at a minimum of tens of thousands, probably more again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The old chestnut in on-premises IT would be that a new system or workload could be fully deployed and dropped into production before someone would say “What are you doing for backups?” To a degree, frameworks like ITIL managed to exert some control over this problem by inserting gates and controls — a requirement for instance that system and workload builders demonstrate they’ve met all the necessary considerations to migrate out of a build\/development cycle into a production cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But of course, ITIL-style controls were exactly what the business needed to prevent <\/em>chaotic data risks within their environments, and they undoubtedly contributed to businesses seeking public cloud services because “IT makes it too hard to get things running”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n