In an increasingly digitalized world, enterprise leaders are moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace. Yet many are concerned doing so will require a costly investment of time, talent and capital.

Citing his own experience helping companies virtualize, David Chang (pictured), co-founder and chief product officer at Actifio Inc., sees this idea as an important misperception to correct.

Perhaps the biggest challenge businesses anticipate is not only having to take time-consuming steps of backup and recovery for massive data sets, but also anticipating rewriting their applications so they are accessible and usable within a new cloud environment. However, companies are not actually required to rewrite architecture when making the transition. 

“It is indeed the best of both worlds,” Chang said, adding that organizations can have the same service level they are used to experiencing with their data centers.

Chang spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Actifio Data Driven event. They discussed a new perspective on the significance of object storage, misperceptions about financial and time investments in transitioning to cloud and why companies do not have to sacrifice service in their new home of the cloud. (*Disclosure below.)

Transition to object storage: unavoidable and overdue

When describing inevitable migration costs, Miniman pointed out: “It’s tough to move data. [The] laws of physics still are in place.” The highest cost stems from having to make two fundamentally different infrastructures match, Chang added.

Database infrastructure is fundamentally different from cloud infrastructure, and rewriting one set of architecture to fit another can be expensive. In these instances, making the switch to object storage is unavoidable, but also overdue.

Object storage allows companies to forgo the tedium of decoding and redesigning their existing data architecture. “Object storage needs to be front and center in everything we do,” Chang said.

Companies are tasked with embracing this next-generation architecture now to forgo the unnecessary hurdle of increasing costs through rewriting. In fact, not switching to this new architecture would mean a company creating new problems for themselves during already challenging and unpredictable times, according to Chang. Enterprises are at least minimizing their on-premises environments, if not moving entire databases to the cloud. Actifio essentially helps soften their learning curve along the journey by allowing organizations to maintain their legacy databases in the cloud. 

Enterprise leaders may begin to see their transition expenses not as a cost, but as an investment with bottom-line benefits over time. “[You can] leverage object storage without changing your application architecture to get that performance and get to the [cost] point that you need to make that entire business viable,” Chang said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Actifio Data Driven event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Actifio Data Driven event. Neither Actifio, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE