The Growing Challenge of Moving Data to the Cloud
Four reasons businesses need Signiant Flight
1. Cloud technology has exacerbated the network bottleneck problem
Before the advent of the cloud, Signiant technology was used in specific applications to connect on-premises data centers and enable distributed business processes. It was initially developed inside Nortel to address the logistics challenge of transferring large code bases globally for 24×7 development, and found its first significant market in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) sector — an intrinsically distributed industry that relies on large, complex global supply chain ecosystems.
As the M&E industry underwent the transition from film and videotape to file-based workflows, Signiant became the standard means of moving media files around the world. Other data-intensive industries started to follow suit as they became more digitized and as file sizes continued to grow. Cloud technology has exacerbated the network bottleneck problem and created demand for Flight as all of these businesses explore how to best leverage the cloud.
2. More industries, and more business processes, are becoming globally distributed
Another impact of cloud adoption is that more industries, and more business processes, are becoming globally distributed — and therefore have a need for Flight.
Companies that previously centralized their data are now sending it to the cloud to take advantage of cloud processing and storage capabilities, therefore encountering the challenges of transferring large data sets over long distances for the first time. And many companies now have much more data to deal with as big data analytics applications come to the forefront and produce massive amounts of unstructured data.
Signiant technology is a key enabler of cloud adoption in these data-intensive industries and applications.
3. The exponential growth of data and tightening deadlines
The exponential growth of data shows no signs of slowing down. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2020 the size of world’s digital data will be nearly 40 Zetabytes, 50-fold growth from the beginning of 2010.
Most of this new content (up to 95%) will be unstructured data not organized in relational databases. Moreover, this growth is asymmetrical, with large files disproportionately accounting for the growing data storage needs. According to a 2015 study by Nasuni Corporation of enterprises utilizing cloud storage, while large files (over 1GB) represent only 0.1% of the total number of files stored, they represent 27% of the total storage used.
Moving large data sets into cloud storage is clearly a problem that more and more businesses will face, and several other trends compound the challenge of data growth.
Enterprises of every size are experiencing tightening deadlines in an ever more competitive world. Increasing globalization is compelling organizations to operate from more and more locations, and the growing threat of cybercrime is impacting every business.
4. Video isn’t just for media companies anymore
All of these factors point to the need for a solution like Flight. It is also interesting to note that video isn’t just for media companies anymore. Technological advances and the accessibility of video creation tools have led to the ubiquity of video as a preferred medium for communications of all kinds across all industries.
With the move to HD, then to 4k video and beyond, video files continue to get bigger. Whether for training, marketing, or employee communications, most companies now use video — and many of these corporate video workflows are in the cloud.
Traditional methods of file movement cannot meet the challenge of sending large files easily, reliably and securely over distance. With the growing use of large files in today’s world, and the increasing pervasiveness of the cloud, these critical shortcomings are becoming a core business problem.
In order to fully embrace the cloud, organizations need an enterprise-class solution like Signiant Flight — a cloud-native offering that combines advanced networking technology with the power of the cloud, all delivered in a Software- as-a-Service package.
