Controlling the Cloud
Cloud computing is driving one of the most significant IT transformations in enterprise computing history. While its underlying concepts have been around for decades, the confluence of high-performance, horizontally scalable hardware and software architectures, ubiquitous network access, and virtualization have made cloud computing a practical solution across the full span of IT workloads. Pioneers such as Amazon.com have demonstrated that IT infrastructure can be practically and cost effectively delivered and consumed over the Internet as a service. And companies such as Salesforce.com continue to reliably deliver critical IT applications as a service, bringing new innovations more quickly and cheaply than traditional enterprise software.
According to Forrester and other industry analysts, cloud spending is growing at a pace four to six times faster than the overall IT market is growing. The accelerating pace is further fueled by other fast-growing computing trends such as mobile computing and big data. These each feed on one another. Mobile computing benefits from having access to information everywhere, across different networks – the sweet spot for cloud computing. The cloud provides a global, public-facing fabric that is always accessible. It enables the ubiquitous access of information, making mobile devices more capable. Mobile devices and the other devices in “the Internet of things” are generating vast volumes of big data that needs to be stored, accessed, and analyzed. Because cloud computing offers a highly scalable and cost effective infrastructure for doing this, it drives more innovation and opportunities for new insights through big data analytics.
It’s a Hybrid IT World
Looking to take advantage of the latest innovations and maximize IT agility while controlling costs, many organizations have adopted “Cloud First” strategies and set policies to adopt cloud-based solutions wherever possible going forward. Even the US government has outlined a Cloud First policy in its
Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, published in February 2011, estimated to reduce costs by billions of dollars per year. However, despite all the compelling benefits of cloud computing and the availability of cloud-based alternatives for most IT systems, few enterprises have the ability to shift all their IT to the cloud at once. We envision the smartest enterprises, public and private, will always have a mix of on-premise and cloud-based IT systems. We call this “the Hybrid IT organization.”
In today’s Hybrid IT organization, CIO’s no longer have the luxury of thinking only about what’s contained within an organization’s “four walls” or even its firewall. They are faced with a new reality that their IT comprises a mix of cloud and on-premise IT systems, all of which need to be integrated. The last thing anyone wants is to fragment their data across the cloud. Integration prevents this and ensures companies can retain control of their data assets.
Get the Most out of Cloud Computing
With traditional, on-premise IT, the value of an IT system is increased significantly by its ability to share data with other systems and control how that data is accessed. This applies equally, if not more so, to the Cloud. Informatica’s comprehensive portfolio of data integration technologies help enterprises get the most from their cloud solutions and retain control of their data. Informatica’s near-universal connectivity ensures data from any on-premise IT system can be integrated with leading cloud solutions such as Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle OnDemand, and dozens of others with more being added every week on the Informatica Marketplace.
Integrate Where Desired – Public Cloud, Private Cloud, or On-premise
Informatica uniquely provides a range of solutions that can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud, or consumed as a true cloud service to enable companies to integrate cloud based IT systems with the rest of their IT systems. In some cases, it is most effective to perform data integration where the majority of the data resides to reduce network latency and costs. In other cases, data integration may be best performed across different systems to balance resource utilization, or accessed as a service that requires no internal IT infrastructure. Our data integration products meet all these needs. They can be deployed on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) or on private clouds built using virtualization technologies from VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle. This enables IT to execute data integration wherever they desire and wherever it is most optimal.
Apply the Benefits of Cloud Computing to Cloud Integration
With the Informatica Cloud, data integration can be accessed as a service in the cloud with all the benefits of the Informatica Platform. This provides unmatched architectural integrity that allows companies to easily deploy a range of integration solutions and leverage the resources and metadata from one Informatica integration environment to another, on-premise and in the cloud as needs change.
As a true, multi-tenant cloud service, Informatica Cloud can be accessed from any web browser on the Internet and on the Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch using the Informatica Cloud Administration application.
There’s no doubt that cloud computing represents a permanent transformation to the IT landscape. As enterprises adopt cloud computing and wrestle with increasing volumes of big data, data integration from Informatica is essential to enable access to the data wherever it resides – in the cloud and on-premise – and to bring it together to unlock critical information to help companies get the most from their IT systems and increase their competitiveness.