COVID-19 may kill the data center, or at the very least forever change storage as we know it,  says Andres Rodriguez, CTO and co-founder of Nasuni, a cloud file services company. Rodriguez and his team created the a file system for the cloud to enable organizations to replace on-premises network-attached storage for a more scalable and collaborative global file store.

SDxCentral (virtually) sat down with Rodriguez to discuss how COVID-19 will affect the data center, the role of cloud computing, and what the new normal will look like. 

COVID-19 has brought about a Zoom marathon that nobody wanted, however, it might very well be the telecommuting experiment the industry needs to finally put the data center to rest. In that light, why will COVID-19 end the enterprise data center?

Rodriguez: I’ve talked to a lot of CIOs at large organizations about their disaster recovery plans, and I don’t think any of us anticipated this situation, where the infrastructure is intact but physically inaccessible because everyone is isolating themselves at home. I think that what it has taught us is that the physical network is a serious liability. IT teams can’t access their own data centers, yet they still have to provide services to thousands of people around the world.

As the cloud expanded and improved, CIOs began to go cloud-only starting about three years ago. And I think it’s clear to everyone that the more a company had moved to the cloud prior to the pandemic, the better it’s been able to keep people working throughout the lockdown.

Before the pandemic, CIOs were already moving their infrastructure to the cloud pretty quickly. As much as they can, CIOs are moving to the cloud right now so their people can be more productive, and once COVID-19 is under control, that transition is going to take off like a rocket.

No company’s IT organization, no matter how large, will be able to match the efficiencies and agility of the cloud. You get essentially infinite resources that are accessible from anywhere, and there is no need for anyone in your organization to touch a single box. Right now, from pretty much anywhere in the world, you can connect to one of the major cloud providers and get no more than 40 milliseconds of latency. That makes even applications like virtual desktops in the cloud a reality. 

What will this look like from a storage perspective? 

Rodriguez: Data will move to the cloud. There’s just no advantage to storing it in your own data center anymore. 

For example, one of our customers is a global operation with several sites in India, which their Prime Minister shut down entirely at the end of March. They use the Nasuni File Services platform to collaborate with their counterparts in Europe and the United States, often on really large files. Increasingly, customers are deploying the appliance as a virtual machine in the cloud, and today, about one-third of our customers do that. 

For this customer, the solution to their dilemma was pretty simple. In less than a week, they spun up file servers in the cloud and redirected all their Indian employees to the servers running closest to their homes, and everyone had access to data, collaborating globally without a hitch. There was no need to touch the appliances they had deployed because all the data resided in the cloud.

Data in the cloud can be automatically backed up, there’s unlimited capacity and it’s accessible from anywhere in the world. Plus, if the data is already in the cloud, you can easily connect it to analytics services to get even more value out of it. Why would anyone want to store their data on-prem?

Outside of the clouds ability to adapt and scale user needs, what is the benefit for enterprises? 

Rodriguez: Ubiquitous access is a huge benefit, especially during a crisis like this. But you can also take advantage of cloud analytics services, automatically protect it without having to set up a separate data protection infrastructure and enable collaboration across continents. 

Plus, no one has to touch any equipment to provision new services or perform maintenance. Certainly, the cloud providers have staff who maintain their infrastructure, but the cloud is far more efficient than a traditional data center, because it was architected to be so highly automated. The amount of physical maintenance it requires is minimal.

Will demand for cloud services soar in some sectors, but wither in other verticals, let's say for sectors where the data that needs to remain on-premises for regulatory and compliance reasons like hospitals and financial institutions – and in reality have never been architected to handle work from home – what will their future look like moving forward?

Rodriguez: It won’t happen all at once, and, like you said, it’ll be more difficult for some sectors than others to move entirely to the cloud. There will be laggards, but this trend is unstoppable. As the advantages of a cloud-only infrastructure become more apparent to the general public, I’m confident you’ll see regulatory changes and new solutions within the cloud that will take care of the issues that currently tether some sectors to traditional data centers. 

We keep hearing the phrase “new normal,” as we continue to operate under the notion that there will be no return to the life we knew before the pandemic – at least for the foreseeable future. I’m curious to know what your vision of this “new normal” will look like for the data center and cloud computing sectors once the storm settles and life begins to pick back up again? 

Rodriguez: The “new normal” in enterprise IT will be defined by a strict separation of the physical and logical worlds. Anything that has any sort of physical dependency, meaning you need actual hardware or people to run it, will be seen as a liability. Even the largest of organizations will want their physical infrastructure to be run by the large dedicated providers who can do this safely and at scale. Meanwhile internal IT operations will move to a software-only world where everything that is needed to monitor, configure and adapt to changing circumstances will be done through software APIs and expected to work without any additional physical interaction. Everyone was caught flat footed by the speed and scale of the COVID-19 disruption. This was an unprecedented event. Next time, every IT organization will be better prepared by having taken the physical out of IT.