If the foundation of digital business is data, then to predict whether enterprises can go all-cloud, simply ask: Is all of their data going to the cloud? advises Jerry Held (pictured), board member of Informatica LLC and mentor at incubator Studio 9+.

“Maybe if you’re a little company, you can run it all in the cloud. But if you’re a big enterprise, you’re going to have to deal with data on-prem, in the cloud — and the cloud isn’t one thing,” Held stated during Informatica World in San Francisco, California.

Enterprises may have data on a number of public and Software as a Service clouds, and they will have to weigh the costs and benefits of lock-in carefully, he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

“For the next multiple-decades, we’re going to be in a hybrid-data world,” Held said, adding that the ideal home for that data may be Amazon Web Services one minute and a colocation center the next.

It has always been the case that using a vendor’s proprietary features may boost performance, but the tradeoff is that it will be harder to move should something better come along, he stated. Proprietary vendors like Oracle Corp. make phenomenal products, and many wise businesses are seeking some type of “hybrid insurance policy,” he said.

NetApp Inc. storage has a deal with data center and colocation provider Equinix Inc., letting customers store data privately and connect it to different clouds as they wish, Held explained (he is also a NetApp board member).

As above, so below

Monetizing and performing analytics on hybrid data requires environment-agnostic tools tools like the ones Informatica (which Held called the “Switzerland of data”) is bringing to market, he said.

First, Informatica’s integrated metadata layer sits underneath and enables processes like data analytics, security and governance. Complementary to that, the company’s new artificial intelligence data engine Claire is the upper layer that people interface with to ask questions of the metadata, Held explained. Perhaps a user has marketing data and would like to blend it with social data.

“You make a query, and all of a sudden, Claire can help you find out where that data is, bring it in and link it into your analytics,” he stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE