One of the hairiest challenges in multicloud computing — and there are many — is data transport. Software applications residing across disparate clouds need data. Transporting data to them can be slow, costly and questionable from a General Data Protection Regulation standpoint.

The solution is redesigned data-replication technology, according to Jagane Sundar (pictured), chief technology officer of WANdisco PLC. Cloud object stores for data have notification systems that might result in inexact replication, he added.

“The problem with using that notification mechanism to replicate your data is that, over a period of time, saying you have two, three terabytes of data, and you’re replicating it over a month or a month and a half, you’ll find that maybe 0.1 percent of your data is not quite accurate anymore,” Sundar said.

Sundar sat down with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, for a CUBEConversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto. They discussed the pains of data replication for multicloud and their cure. (* Disclosure below.)

Data in multiple instances in an instant

Data scientists are a tough crowd. They won’t trust that data set for use in analytics or applications, according to Sundar. The other problem is the logistics of data transport from one location to another.

“The problem turns into, ‘I need replicas of this data in this region and this other region, perhaps in two different cloud-vendor locations,’” he said. 

Data-replication and transport plumbing is not what data scientists and developers are in business for. They need a solution that provides exact replication and liberates them from lower-level infrastructure concerns.

WANdisco LiveData for MultiCloud abstracts the complexity of replicating data for use in different environments.

“A specific example would be [Apache] Hive tables that a user is building in one data center,” Sundar said. “An IT professional from that organization can buy our replication software; that table will be available in multiple data centers in multiple regions — available for both read and write.” Neither user has to do any special replicating or transporting work.

This type of replication has bonuses. For example, it allows users to sidestep cloud-vendor lock-in and comply with GDPR’s regional data regulations, Sundar concluded.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: WANdisco PLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither WANdisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE