Events of the past year have created a situation where enterprises either become digital businesses or go out of business.

This function, brought on by a global pandemic that brought much of the world online for work and service delivery, has placed more pressure on companies to manage data and the complexity of hybrid and multicloud solutions.

For data governance and automated solutions providers such as Io-Tahoe LLC, the need for business resilience and a clear understanding of the value of data for its enterprise customers has never been greater. Reality set in for many firms in 2020, and being able to centralize, consolidate and identify critical data operations has become essential in 2021.

“With enterprises going on this forced march, what they’re finding is they don’t have a single version of the truth and almost nobody has an accurate view of where their critical data is,” said Yusef Khan, head of data services for Io-Tahoe. “Your challenge is to deal with these large legacy data states where you have to consolidate. That’s really where Io-Tahoe comes in. We massively accelerate that process of putting a single version of the truth into place.”

Khan spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, and he was joined by Suresh Kanniappan, vice president, U.S. country head, and customer success manager of infrastructure management and cybersecurity services at Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Vellante also spoke with Ajay Vohora, chief executive officer of Io-Tahoe; Fadzi Ushewokunze, global financial services architect at Red Hat Inc.; Sabita Davis, enterprise account executive at Io-Tahoe; and Noah Fields, data operations sales engineer at Io-Tahoe. The discussion, part of Io-Tahoe’s Data Automation Series “Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and Multicloud,” included how Io-Tahoe works with Red Hat and Happiest Minds to provide fast, detailed and secure data profiles; the use of automation to reduce the burden on IT staff; and the importance of building interoperable solutions for the hybrid cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the full session below:

Unifying data sources

To help its enterprise customers arrive at a single source of truth for data, Io-Tahoe has formed a strategic partnership with Red Hat. One of the goals behind this key alliance is to unify the sources of data in support of critical business applications, an important need in a multicloud world.

“It used to be about the volume and types of data, but as applications become more connected and interconnected, the location of the data really matters, how we serve that data up to those apps,” Vohora said. “In partnership with Red Hat, we’re able to inject our data discovery and machine learning into different locations, whether it’s AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform or on-premises. It’s being able to automate that discovery and pulling that single view.”

The latest installment in Io-Tahoe’s Data Automation Series included a demonstration of how Red Hat’s OpenShift family of containerization software products helped Io-Tahoe deliver faster time to operation, simplicity, automation, control and digital resilience.

“OpenShift provides extensive automation and speeds up the time to operation,” said Fields, who noted that the latest version of the Red Hat product included enhancements for the container engine. “This means you get to skip the container engine installation step and you don’t have to log into each individual container host and configure networking, registry servers or storage. It automates the more boring, tedious processes.”

The solution with Red Hat is designed to take advantage of faster deployment time associated with containers and Kubernetes. Customers can quickly spin up Io-Tahoe on their own on-premises environment or on a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google or IBM Cloud.

“We’ve really moved our customers away from the whole idea of needing a team of engineers to apply controls to data as compared to other manually driven workflows,” Davis said. “With templates, automation, pre-built policies and data controls, one person can be fully operational within a few hours and achieve results straight out of the box on any cloud.”

Taking security to data level

In addition to saving time through automation, Io-Tahoe is also leveraging OpenShift to provide important security functionality. By running legacy and containerized applications in a unified platform, users can take advantage of automation and tooling to monitor systems for security and compliance.

“We’re using OpenShift to take that security application of controls to the data level,” Vohora said. “It’s understanding what data is there and being able to assess it to say who should have access to it, which application permission should be applied to it. That’s a great combination of Red Hat and Io-Tahoe.”

Vohora’s company has also formed a partnership with Happiest Minds, a digital transformation IT consulting and services firm. The alliance between the two companies is focused on offering data discovery and adaptive governance solutions.

“Identification of the data is key for customers,” Kanniappan explained. “Though customers think they have clear visibility of data, we do an assessment from an external point of view to see how critical the data is. We help in building a viable model to ensure these identified critical assets are secured and monitored.”

The company tagline for Happiest Minds is “Born Digital-Born Agile,” and Io-Tahoe sees an opportunity to blend its strengths in automation solutions with its partner’s agile approach in assisting businesses with digital transformation.

“Io-Tahoe is all about automation,” Khan said. “We’re using machine learning algorithms to make data discovery, data cataloging, understanding data redundancy much easier, and we’re enabling customers and partners to be able to do it much more quickly. When you combine our emphasis on automation with the emphasis on agility that Happiest Minds has, that’s a really nice combination.”

Cross-cloud solution

Agility is important in the context of automation and data discovery because companies must increasingly run in a hybrid cloud model. Workloads need to move across different platforms, and businesses are seeking secure environments with cross-cloud communication.

“It’s all about secure interconnectivity and on-demand allocation of resources across clouds,” Ushewokunze said. “It is that interconnectivity that allows workloads to be moved and how management can be unified into a state that can work. How well you have these interconnections has a direct impact on how well your hybrid cloud will work. That is very important.”

With the challenge of navigating digital transformation in a hybrid cloud world comes the opportunity to extend data resilience solutions to affect areas beyond just the business itself. Some of Io-Tahoe’s customers are leveraging its solutions to help make the planet a better place as well.

“This year we can see already that some of the more proactive companies are looking at initiatives such as net zero emissions, using data to better understand how they can have a better, special impact,” Vohora noted. “For those regulatory compliance issues that may have been external, we’re seeing similar patterns emerging to internal initiatives that are benefiting the environment, social impact and costs.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Io-Tahoe’s Data Automation Series “Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and Multicloud” livestream event. Neither Io-Tahoe LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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