Revolutionizing data management: Unleashing the potential of hybrid cloud environments

A Comprehensive Discussion on Strategies, Benefits, and Best Practices for Data Management in Hybrid Cloud Architectures

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises face the complex challenge of effectively managing and harnessing their data across hybrid cloud environments. As organizations strive for agility, scalability, and data security, the hybrid cloud architecture has emerged as a powerful solution. To gain deeper insights into the intricacies of data management in hybrid cloud environments, we had the privilege of interviewing Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, EVP, Co-head of Delivery and Head – Cloud, Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, Infosys.

During this exclusive interview, Narsimha Rao Mannepalli shared his expertise on the challenges faced by enterprises, the strategies and technologies employed to streamline data management, and the remarkable benefits of embracing a hybrid cloud approach. Join us as we delve into the world of hybrid cloud data management and explore how Infosys is helping its clients harness the full potential of this transformative technology.

What are some of the challenges that enterprises face when managing data in hybrid cloud environments?

Need for a ‘right-cloud’ solution, deriving actionable insights with Live data, faster time to market, superior client and associate experience, need for a secure digital infrastructure, compliance and regulations are all driving a number of enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud architecture. The key challenges that enterprises face while adopting such architectures include data security, technology complexity in data engineering across different environments, cost of operations and performance. The ability to deliver actionable insights to business leveraging the power of data and AI, and consequently a robust ROI, dictate the choices in the hybrid cloud while managing data.

What strategies or technologies can be employed to streamline data management in hybrid and multicloud environments?

Composable architecture patterns and cloud-agnostic design is key for managing hybrid and multi cloud environments. This allows for data processing rules to be defined agnostic to the underlying platform components and choosing the best execution engine available at runtime. This is one of the core design principles for the solution & assets we have to cater to such requirements for our clients. Another strategy adopted in a multi cloud scenario is workload-based cloud adoption i.e., adoption of one cloud for Data & AI and another for enterprise applications, etc. This limits cross-cloud data movement and reduces the complexity of data management.

What are the key benefits of a hybrid cloud? How is Infosys helping its clients harness these benefits?

By adopting a hybrid cloud approach, enterprises can enjoy greater flexibility and leverage the best of both public and on-prem worlds while making functional and financial sense. While hybrid and multicloud architecture sometimes has been necessitated by regulations, it also has certain advantages in terms of cloud exit strategy, choice of best-of-breed services for different workloads, and availability of storage regions as per regulatory needs. Infosys is helping clients adopt hybrid cloud architecture by providing services around hybrid cloud strategy, data governance strategy, technology evaluation, and execution. We help enterprises modernize the data landscape across hybrid and multicloud environments to accelerate digital transformation and eliminate mass data fragmentation by consolidating data silos onto a single, easy-to-manage software-defined platform that can host enterprise-class services including backup and recovery, file shares, object stores, disaster recovery, data security and governance, dev/test data provisioning, and analytics.

How can hybrid cloud investments contribute to next-generation data management?

With most of the enterprises moving towards the adoption of data product architecture to de-centralize data ownership and accelerate business value the core principles of data management in a hybrid cloud construct such as distributed data governance, technology agnostic data engineering, infrastructure-as-code, everything-as-a-service will be of great value. These are the foundational principles that will drive next-generation data management.

What role does data governance play in ensuring data integrity and compliance in hybrid cloud infrastructures?

Data governance has a pivotal role to play in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Considering that hybrid cloud architectures have to meet the regulatory needs, data rights management, cross-region data sharing, sensitive data discovery, data obfuscation, etc. are going to be critical. While dealing with internet scale data, automated tagging, sensitive data discovery, and lineage discovery is going to be important for scaling the data governance function. “Governance by exception” is a paradigm that we advise our clients to adopt where AI automates most of these functions, with humans playing the role of reviewers and exception handlers.

How can organizations ensure seamless integration and interoperability between their existing on-premises infrastructure and the hybrid cloud environment?

Composable architecture patterns and cloud-agnostic design is key for managing hybrid and multi cloud environments. This allows for data processing rules to be defined agnostic to the underlying platform components and choosing the best execution engine available at runtime. This is one of the core design principles for data analytics solution assets to cater to such requirements for our clients. Technologies like Spark and DBT (data build tool) provide cloud-agnostic capabilities for data processing which can form the foundation for data engineering in a hybrid cloud environment.