Storage is one of the fastest-moving areas in the technology ecosystem in recent years. Dealing with workloads and providing an end-to-end solutions for enterprises is one of the main challenges right now, according to Erin Boyd (pictured), senior principal software engineer at Red Hat Inc.

“I think workloads are key, and we have to figure out a way that we can make the data more agile and create interfaces to really enable that,” she said. “It’s very unlikely that an enterprise is going to rely on one cloud or stay with one cloud or want their data in one cloud. They’re going to want to have the flexibility to leverage that.”

Boyd spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in San Diego, California. They discussed the storage challenges for businesses and the roadmap for the future of storage. (* Disclosure below.)

Storage goes through major evolution

The storage process is undergoing great development, according to Boyd. “For the past five years we’ve been really focused on being mindful of what [application programming interfaces] are common across all the vendors … to ensure that we’re not excluding any vendors from being part of this ecosystem,” she said. “With that we’ve created the basis of things like persistent volumes, claims, storage classes to automate that storage quotas to be able to have management and control over it.”

The new stage is that companies are actually running stateful applications on Kubernetes, and it is necessary to address their needs, according to Boyd. “So things like snapshotting, eventually volume cloning, which has just gone in, and migrating all these type of things that exist within the data plane are going to be the next evolution of things.”

This new step also comes with security concerns, though. And enterprises want to ensure data protection in the multicloud environment.

“Red Hat really takes a holistic view in making sure that we provide a very consistent secure platform,” Boyd stated. “That’s one of the things that you see when you come onto OpenShift [family of containerization software developed by Red Hat], for instance, that you’re seeing security tightened a little bit more to ensure that you’re running in the best possible way to protect your data.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE