Cloud to ground or ground to cloud attack?

Vineet Jain examines strategies for success in hybrid cloud implementation

You may be wondering if you are reading the Army Times or similar because the title could be misconstrued as some sort of military terminology. I assure you that you're in the right place and if you give me a moment of your time, you'll understand why.

You might also formulate an opinion on which of the two possible approaches suggested in the headline best suits your customer. Why do VARs that want to offer a cloud service need a ground-to-cloud approach?

While there are many examples of SaaS apps that live entirely in the cloud, there are more that live behind the firewall for one reason or another. An enterprise will have a mix of some cloud applications and some ground applications.

This ground-to-cloud hybrid approach enables VARs to protect and benefit from their existing on-premise storage business as well as use that VAR business to help them become a cloud provider.

Single sign-on (SSO) is a good example of having some ground and some cloud. While having Facebook as the SSO authority for other cloud apps works for consumers, enterprise customers will want to tie SSO into an enterprise authentication source such as Active Directory, LDAP or SAML.

The same analogy applies for storage. Despite the fact that cloud storage vendors are dropping prices on a regular basis in a race to the bottom, enterprise customers continue to use some cloud storage and some local storage.

What data is sent to cloud storage and what data is kept locally is normally about speed of access – a much-needed requirement for the consumer of that data.

Cloud-only file sharing services are a good example of a service that resellers want to add to their portfolio but often struggle to do so.

However, file sharing services that use local storage for speed and connect local storage to the cloud for accessibility are different.

The hybrid approach to file sharing provides resellers with a bridge protecting their current infrastructure business from cloud-only solutions as well as providing them with the recurring revenue model that they are looking for by becoming a cloud business.

Resellers often have trouble crossing the chasm from selling perpetual software licences and hardware to implementing and selling a service.

We are now seeing more of the same ground and cloud requirements in file sharing. The clear schism that existed between ground (access to files from storage that sits behind the firewall) and cloud (access to files that are synched to any number of public cloud providers) is quickly being eroded.

Once-distinctive boundaries are getting fuzzy and both worlds will co-exist, albeit in a totally different shape; the ease of use and cost driving cloud, merged with "I want it now" and the speed of access driving ground, all combined in one solution that addresses the needs of governance, control and compliance that companies require.

In all this, the mobility and spread of mobile devices is the most critical driver. The role of mobile access in active decision making and being able to get information when you need it is improving business efficiency by leaps and bounds.

Yet there are challenges and opportunities in both device and data mobility that are similar to the location and speed considerations that I mentioned before relating to storage.

Since all these devices – whether a PC, tablet or smartphone – are mobile by nature, data or file mobility is a necessity.

An office in Asia will want to access files from its local storage if on the office wireless LAN and from local cloud storage if on a wireless WAN. If at all possible, they do not want to traverse the Pacific for their files. They want to locate files closer to the devices wherever feasible.

"Choke point" is a term often heard in many movies with a military theme, but it is also relevant to ground and cloud in a slightly different context.

It's pretty simple: if your organisation has many users accessing files inside your firewall, cloud-only offerings turn the internal network connection to the firewall into a choke point – a point of bandwidth contention.

If your customers have 1,000 file-sharing users, the number of users actively sharing files at one time is probably about 250.

Imagine each of those users sharing a 50MB file. Now also imagine all the other cloud services they have running: VoIP, corporate videoconferencing, personal videoconferencing, ERP, CRM, SFA, HR and so on.

You can see where having some ground will reduce this network choke point – instead of having the rest of the organisation stare at that spinning icon while their browser or application waits for the network.

The recurring revenue model is made possible by offering a monthly subscription service. For resellers it smoothes out the peaks and valleys of perpetual software licencing and hardware sales.

Assuming minimal churn, subscription revenue can grow year over year and provide value well beyond the typical three-year software sales cycle.

Vineet Jain is chief executive of Egnyte