Data management within the context of an on-premise IT environment has always been difficult enough. With the introduction of cloud computing most IT organizations are only exacerbating a pre-existing data management issue that many of them have no real tools in place to address.

To address that issue Actifio has extended the reach of its data virtualization that makes it simpler to unify the management of all the copies of the same data that exists across the enterprise. Now Actifio is not only extending that capability out to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by making its software available on the AWS Marketplace; it is also giving customers the option of storing data in cloud using the Google Nearline Cloud Storage service that was rolled out last month. Actifio sells primarily through the channel

Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh said that with more data than ever moving into the cloud, IT organizations are rapidly approaching a crisis point in terms of their ability to manage all that data. Via Actifio Copy Data Virtualization software those IT organizations are able to both eliminate redundant copies of data and also make use of a Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) capability to centrally manage that data, Ashutosh said.

In general, Ashutosh said at this point it’s only a matter of time before compliance and regulation issues force the data management in the cloud issue. The opportunity for solution providers is to either provide a mechanism through which IT organizations can regain control over that data, or present them with a managed service through which they manage that task on their behalf. In either scenario, the ability to pass a compliance audit these days increasingly means being able to demonstrate actual control over where data is being stored.

Scaling cloud growth

While there’s no doubt that the rise of cloud computing has presented the channel with a number of business challenges, the fact remains that the more widespread the usage of cloud platforms becomes the more challenged internal IT organizations become. Truth be told, most of them are not particularly good at managing the volume of data they already have. Not only is there soon going to be orders of magnitude more data than ever to manage thanks to the rise of Big Data applications, that data is going to be strewn everywhere.

Without some mechanism in place to actually manage all that data, it really is only a question of when will the senior leaders of IT organizations realize that an inability to manage that data is a near and present danger to their continued gainful employment.