In an interaction with CRN, Vinod Ganesan, Country Manager, India, Cloudera shares insights into how the recently announced Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud (CDP Private Cloud) makes it easy for IT to enable business teams to respond to changing market conditions in an agile manner without compromising on security or data governance
What are the compelling reasons behind the continued growth of the private and hybrid cloud services market? How are you strengthening your grip on this market?
To keep up with the constantly changing business landscape and to respond to evolving market conditions, businesses demand an agility that private and hybrid cloud services extend. We live in a digital age where data is the foundational element needed to drive this agility to further innovation, and improve customer satisfaction.
Cloud provides access to compute and storage infrastructure and businesses should be able to take advantage of it without the fear of vendor lock-in or a proprietary application layer hindering their progress in the hybrid, multi-cloud world. With that, Cloudera has announced the Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud (CDP Private Cloud) that is built for hybrid cloud and runs seamlessly on-premises and public cloud, all with a consistent, built-in security and governance. The CDP Private Cloud is the culmination of the vision for an enterprise data cloud that unlocks the power of any data, running in any cloud from the Edge to AI.
What’s the rationale behind launching the CDP Private Cloud? How is it poised to help enterprises in their digital transformation journey?
We have worked with several industry leaders, from eight out of the top ten global banks to all top ten telcos or automotive companies. Due to this, we have an intimate view into the challenges these enterprises face in their data-driven journey. We also commissioned an extensive research in accordance with Harvard Business Review to better understand some of the findings we uncovered through our own customer conversations. Here are some key stats from this HBR study:
- 41% customers say that they don’t have a strategy to deal with data management, especially in a multi cloud environment.
- Over 60% of the customers said that they didn’t know what kind of data they needed to act as their business initiators.
- 54% customers acknowledged that data silos are their biggest challenge.
- 69% of the customers said that they required an expert’s support in data architecture building. This gave us the insight that we needed to develop our own private data platform architecture.
We then took these learnings and provided customers with four key capabilities through our enterprise data platform
- The ability to support and manage data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
- The ability to manage the data across its life cycle, all the way from edge to AI and the ability to embark on multiple use cases that their organizations require
- Security that cuts across all these layers for a unified experience
- The ability to do all of this using an open source platform
Here, we began our journey of executing the industry’s first enterprise data cloud in September 2019 with the launch of Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) through a public cloud release. The recent introduction of the private cloud element supports, manages, and governs data with the flexibility of deploying it across any cloud platform. It also completes our vision of an enterprise data cloud.
By creating a multi-cloud data architecture, CDP allows for the rapid onboarding of mission-critical applications that can be run from anywhere without any disruption to existing ones.
Cloudera’s data platform empowers people to draw insights from complex data patterns. It allows organizations to have a common architecture for on-prem as well as public cloud workloads. Data can therefore be stored anywhere, based on what makes most sense for the workload and business. Same platform on-prem and public cloud also means more users, workloads, and environments can be managed without requiring a linear increase in the data operations team or siloed expertise. CDP makes it easy for IT to enable business teams to respond to changing market conditions in an agile manner without compromising on security or data governance. The enterprise data platform also optimizes infrastructure costs with the use of innovative technology.
What kind of uptake do you witness for enterprise data cloud here in India? Where do you see CDP Private Cloud filling the gap in terms of adoption of hybrid/multi cloud by the enterprises?
Every business needs to understand ongoing market and industry trends in order to make informed decisions in this constantly evolving business landscape. To become industry disruptors, enterprises need to identify problems faced by consumers, redefine current market boundaries and prepare a roadmap to achieve their goal of delivering value to the customer through it. Data is a very crucial factor at every step of this process.
Regulated industries like banking and financial services though, haven’t really fully adopted cloud architectures because of their concerns around providing security and governance framework, while supporting that required agility. As a result, one of the key patterns emerging in India is the adoption of shadow IT. According to Gartner, 40% of the IT spend will be taken away by shadow IT. This happens because businesses typically want to move at a particular pace but the IT is unable to support the pace. So, businesses find alternate investments and on-point solutions by leveraging cloud as a medium to accelerate that process. But in doing so, one of the key risks that gets uncovered is on data security and governance as IT is unable to trace everyone with access to this data.
CDP’s private cloud offering hands the control back to IT by giving them an architecture that meets the demands of the business and benefits they would otherwise find in a public cloud environment. All of this while ensuring the security and governance of data and the ability to build a hybrid cloud environment that can integrate with the business’ proprietary platforms.
How will CDP Private Cloud help organizations leverage the complete power of cloud for agility while enhancing their security, governance, and compliance capabilities?
CDP Private Cloud is built for hybrid cloud, seamlessly connecting on-premises environments to public clouds with consistent, built-in security and governance.
Regardless of where your data resides, CDP offers enterprise-level security and governance, from Edge to AI. CDP is secured and governed by Cloudera SDX (shared data experience), an integral part of CDP. It unifies diverse analytics and delivers consistent security, governance, and lifecycle management against a shared data catalog. With a common data catalog, SDX provides fast and powerful data migration and replication, securely delivering data where business needs dictate, for superior operational efficiency and control.
SDX also enables different users to work together productively on a common platform. It allows IT teams to make available self-service analytics and data that users actually want to use, on a platform where they have control. SDX also enables IT to administer everything anywhere, even across transient cloud workloads, from a single pane of glass with efficient and comprehensive control of users, data, analytics and resources.
How does CDP Private Cloud serve as the crucial data foundation for AI-driven organizations that are looking to provision compute-on-demand without affecting their regular mission-critical workloads?
Every AI-driven organization needs to ensure that they have a modernized data platform. CDP Private Cloud modernizes customers’ data platform with a cloud-native architecture that accelerates time to value by ten times, ensures critical workloads meet their SLAs, all with the extensibility of hybrid cloud.
IT and Data platform teams want the agility, isolation and cost efficiency of public cloud in their on-prem data centers. And they find that the data platforms available today can’t meet their organizations’ needs because it is built on a monocluster (Gen-1) architecture, based on principles from ten years ago before cloud native became a term. In a monocluster, all workloads share the same resources with minimum isolation so if a particular workload spikes a demand, it takes resources away from more important workloads.
CDP, on the other hand, reduces the time to onboard new cases and use cases. It also sets up custom environments which do not impact other users or groups. Our private cloud offering combines the latest technology advancements in infrastructure through the separation of compute/storage, containers/K8s, object storage, etc., to create an on-prem private cloud that easily and efficiently scales to meet the demands of critical workloads.
With respect to CDP Private Cloud, could you throw some light on your GTM strategy to capture the opportunities lying out there in the India market?
The channel is extremely important to Cloudera as most customers rely on these partners for support in their cloud and data journeys. And in India, the majority of our customers execute our product through our partners which makes our partner ecosystem an integral part of our GTM strategy. We work with them through our partner program Cloudera Connect, which enables partners to guide their customers on their journey to the cloud, with pathways for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments or direct migration.
We constantly evolve Cloudera Connect to address industry trends, cloud business models, use cases, and skill-sets, and to increase the program’s value to partners. One of our recent announcements focused on our partner ecosystem is the Cloudera Connect Market Builders program, which is a set of resources that we offer our partners, using which they can then explain and better position the Cloudera Data Platform in their conversations.
How is Cloudera transforming the current global crisis into opportunities for growth, both for the organization as well as partner ecosystem?
At a time when business as usual is no longer an option, we are focused on helping each other stay healthy and adapt to this time of crisis. Since the pandemic struck, we have prioritized the safety and well-being of all Clouderans and those who we do business with across the globe. With business continuity plans in place, we are poised to deliver on our promise of uninterrupted support for our clients’ production workloads and critical systems and we do not foresee any impact on our ability to continue to do so. We are fully equipped to serve our customers and partners and are confident of being able to swiftly respond to changing market dynamics, minimizing impacts to our business, and disruptions to customers and partners.
