Suppose you were on your way to the cloud when the Shortcut Cab pulled up in front of you. What would you do?
“Hop in, Mac!” the driver would say. “I’ll take you right to the cloud. I know all the shortcuts.”
“Hmm,” you might think. “I could use a few of those shortcuts. This digital transformation is kind of a drag sometimes. Planning workload migration, monitoring cloud resources, figuring out how to deal with backup and restore . . . there are a lot of moving parts and it’s a lot of work.”
Would you “hop in, Mac?” Would you try to take shortcuts on your cloud migration path?
Maximizing the value of the cloud
I’ve got news for you and for the Shortcut Cab driver: There are no shortcuts if you really want to maximize the value of your investment in the cloud.
There are tools, but there are no shortcuts.
Sure, you can plunk down your credit card and expense the monthly cost of storage, compute and network resources, then gradually push a few applications into the cloud. That’s a shortcut. But is it really digital transformation? Or is it more of a drive-by than a cloud strategy?
We’ve put together a technical brief called Maximizing the Value of the Cloud with Quest® to highlight a suite of Quest solutions designed to facilitate your journey to the cloud. IT managers like you use our solutions to ease cloud migration planning, protect cloud resources and data, and take advantage of the cloud for disaster recovery and long-term data retention.
Planning workload migration — Foglight for Virtualization
When you’re planning the migration of your workloads to the cloud, you may not yet know which cloud offering and provider are the best fit. Use Foglight for Virtualization for visualizing, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing your infrastructure before you migrate. Foglight analyzes the resource consumption and performance of any virtual machine (VM). It then recommends the best fit and lowest risk among cloud, public, private, colocation and managed service provider (MSP) scenarios. Foglight is published in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and can be installed in virtually any private or public cloud service.
Monitoring cloud resources — Foglight for Virtualization
How will you monitor the infrastructure integrity of your cloud resources? In other words, how will you decide on thresholds, alarms, performance counters and normal operating ranges? With Hybrid Cloud Manager, Foglight for Virtualization lets you monitor the performance of your Azure and AWS infrastructure. You can reclaim over-provisioned resources, manage growth with automated VM deployment and receive notifications on any performance anomaly before it becomes a big problem.
Protecting cloud-based applications and data — NetVault® Backup
Once your IT assets are in the cloud, how will you protect them? NetVault Backup is designed to simplify enterprise data protection in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. It uses Microsoft’s RESTful Graph API to protect Office 365 and other cloud-based applications that run on Oracle, SQL, SharePoint, DB2 and SAP.
Using the cloud for disaster recovery and long-term storage — QoreStor™
Think of the cloud as a cost-effective solution for storing or replicating backups offsite for disaster recovery. QoreStor is a software-defined deduplication and data replication platform you can use for direct-to-cloud backup and recovery, as well as for replication of backups from an on-premises data center to the cloud. QoreStor works with providers like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware Cloud on AWS, Rackspace and other private and public clouds to back up directly to the cloud over your WAN, but at LAN-like speeds.
Shortcuts, no. Tools, yes.
Cloud-ready data protection solutions from Quest are designed for hybrid data center and hybrid cloud environments. Wherever you may be on your way to the cloud, have a look at our technical brief, Maximizing the Value of the Cloud with Quest. You’ll see the concerns you face at each important point along the way, and you’ll see how we’ve designed solutions that address those concerns.
And think twice before you accept a ride from a cab driver who calls you Mac.
I Want to Learn about Maximizing the Value of the Cloud with Quest
Photo credit: Anthony Albright BY-SA 2.0
