Caveat Emptor Aotearoa

Looking at the Aotearoa cloud market, I see a tempest brewing. What was Cirrus or Stratus is now positively Cumulonimbus!

New Zealand has benefitted for a long time from the tyranny of distance when it comes to cloud.?

The hyperscalers, sort of like the Eye of Sauron, have been gazed westward at Australia, and beyond, landing multiple nodes of Azure and AWS accordingly (and more recently, Google). This has seen the Australian market go through the total cloud transformation journey, from uncontrolled app:dev sprawl to where we are now with major banks and other institutions moving their core applications to the public cloud.

Not so for Aotearoa.

In the absence of hyperscalers making the hop across the ditch, New Zealand has been under the auspices of the ‘cloud entrepreneur’, who, in traditional New Zealand fashion, saw the opportunity and took it with both hands.?

At Veritas, we are lucky to have an incredible partnership with one of those entrepreneurial companies who took the cloud market by storm (no pun intended), being Datacom.?Datacom have invested heavily in building out an incredibly robust, sovereign, and secure cloud platform with multiple nodes throughout New Zealand, with a client list to be proud of.?

Our partnership is protecting that data.?

Veritas backs up all of Datacom’s cloud data using our NetBackup software, with a similarly designed architecture ensuing that no Datacom client will ever not be able to recover their data should they fall victim to, say, Ransomware.

But now, as I said, the clouds are changing shape, and rolling in are the thunderheads of Azure, AWS and Google. These cloud fronts are going to collide head on with Datacom (and other local NZ cloud providers) and one could possibly suggest, that when multiple cloud fronts meet in such a small geographical area, it’s going to cause quite the storm.

Probably true.?

Azure, AWS and Google are going to be investing millions standing up the infrastructure that supports their clouds. They will be wooing the NZX50 (and others) with the promise of elastic compute and storage, trans-Tasman capabilities (for those that have hopped west), and in the case of AWS, a claim to sovereignty akin to that offered by Datacom.

But I have two words for all New Zealand companies to be conscious off.?

Caveat emptor.?

Azure, AWS and Google are great public cloud platforms. Veritas enjoys a partnership with all. But they are, by definition, public clouds. That makes them materially different from on-premise (obviously), but also to Datacom's local New Zealand cloud (perhaps less obvious).

With Azure, there are two plays of course, M365 (don’t hesitate, make that move) competing with Google suite, and then Azure workload support, competing head-to-head with AWS and in turn Datacom and other local NZ cloud providers.?Handily, both AWS and Azure are turning up almost at the same time, so supply is rich, demand is high, so economics would suggest an aggressive price point to woo those NZX50 is sure to follow.?

A fertile ground indeed for the NZ CIO to exploit.?

But all clouds are not created equal, hence the caveat.?

Public clouds, no matter which variant, will predominantly stand-up virtual machines for you to run your applications on, provide a seemingly unlimited capacity of data storage, secure the platform, and provide the ongoing service assurance that keeps it patched, maintained and, available.

But this is what you won’t get told.?

They won’t take accountability to back up your data.?In fact, they specifically exclude themselves from this and make it your problem.?Even M365.

They won't assure your application availability; they espouse Shared Responsibility models.?Again, that’s your problem to manage and solve.?They certainly won’t manage your application availability between clouds!?They certainly won’t give you an application availability SLA, only the infrastructure, and that SLA will not include the fact you have, or need? an on-premise or alternate cloud instance of that application.

They don’t de-dupe your data if you take a snapshot (or two) with you thinking that this is equivalent to a backup (ummm, not really).?That means that if you follow the 3-2-1 rule, you’re going to be paying 3X for your backup, as it’s turning up TB for TB.?Veritas, via Datacom, will de-dupe all that data (for VM’s we’re talking by over 80% as an average) dramatically lowering the costs you will pay for your cloud infrastructure.

This is the fundamental difference between a public cloud and a private cloud like Datacom.

Assurance.

You run an app on Datacom’s cloud, trust me, they are backing that up with Veritas (we have never had our software compromised). The data will never leave New Zealand, and their platform is not owned by a US company that may be asked by the US government for access to that data. That is the difference. Assured security.?

Everything else is largely the same…compute, storage, network, security software, people keeping the lights on, cooling and power management…just not data protection.

Now let us be clear!?This does not mean don’t move to Azure, AWS or Google, oh contraire, many applications will make total sense to move to a public cloud, and if New Zealand follows Australia (albeit with learnings), the first apps will be the less critical apps, so you can dip your toes in the public cloud waters, and lastly will be those apps that actually run your business.?

It just means make sure you protect what is already protected, as you make the move.?

Therefore, I am so proud of our partnership with Datacom. Like a sage oracle or soothsayer, Datacom have abstracted their data protection (Veritas powered backup) from their overall cloud proposition and called it Cloud Protect. Smart thinking Datacom. A single managed service from Datacom can continue to protect everything that you have in their cloud AND protect everything you elect to move to Azure, AWS or Google…all with a common and consistent SLA and giving cloud data the same protection as what you have enjoyed with Datacom for years.?

So rather than collide with these impending storm fronts of public cumulonimbus clouds, they are embracing the inevitability of a multi-cloud (Datacom call this #RightCloud) but pivoting their value proposition to provide the #RightCloud for the #RightApplication. But ensuring it is protected, regardless of location!

If I were an NSX50 client, I would be talking to Datacom. Not only will they work with you to get the right application on the #RightCloud, but they will also ensure that whilst you do that, that your data and applications are protected...as if they were on-premise sitting safely behind your firewall.?

If you are an NSX50 and not with Datacom, but sitting on some other NZ cloud providers platform, I'd be asking myself if they offer as deep and robust data security posture as Datacom when you decide to start moving applications to the hyperscalers.?

Aotearoa, when it comes to your choices in the cloud...caveat emptor!