by Barry Murphy
In an earlier post, I described the importance of having the ability to quickly search for information stored in the Cloud. The post pointed out that Cloud search is somewhat more complicated than one might think at first glance because the speed of search is affected by how close the index lives to the actual data in the Cloud infrastructure. One comment I received was that Cloud search can be fast and simple if the Cloud vendor promises a certain service level for query times and results. That can address part of the issue around search (although IaaS providers – what we are truly talking about when we say “Cloud” – are typically not interested in guaranteeing SLAs for things like search because they allow customers to provision their infrastructure set to enable fast search with products like X1 Rapid Discovery). Even if a Cloud vendor were to guarantee phenomenal search SLAs, the issue of unified enterprise search of all information still remains.
The reality is that enterprises and government agencies store information in “hybrid” environments that encompass on-premise systems within corporate data centers, virtualized systems that companies operate, and Cloud-based repositories. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of mainstream enterprises will have a hybrid cloud. And, research from NetApp shows that organizations will be managing data across multiple cloud environments, not just a single provider, per se.
These are exciting developments. As organizations embrace more modern infrastructures, there are many benefits to be had. What we need to remember, however, is that business professionals still need to quickly find and take action on their information assets to do their jobs. As that information gets further scattered, enterprise search will take on increased importance. Workers don’t care if their data is stored on-premise or in the Cloud as long as they can quickly find it in an easy-to-use interface.
The challenge for today’s organizations is that information now lives in multiple infrastructures – on-premise, virtual, Cloud, or most frequently, a hybrid of all of these. Current approaches to including Cloud-based data in enterprise search and eDiscovery require downloading a copy of the data to search so that it resides alongside other local content. Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of storing the data in the Cloud in the first place.
This takes me back to my original point: Cloud search is very important. But, Cloud search cannot simply exist in a vacuum. An effective enterprise search solution will combine on-premise search capabilities that can talk to search in the Cloud – without requiring downloading the cloud-based information in order to search across all data.