We like to keep things light at Unravel. In a recent event, we hosted a group of industry experts for a night of laughs and drinks as we discussed cloud migration and heard from our friends at Don’t Tell Comedy.
Unravel VP of Solutions Engineering Chris Santiago and AWS Sr. Worldwide Business Development Manager for Analytics Kiran Guduguntla moderated a discussion with data professionals from Black Knight, TJX Companies, AT&T Systems, Georgia Pacific, and IBM, among others.
This post briefly recaps that discussion.
The cloud journey
To start, Chris asked attendees where they were in their cloud journey. The top responses were tied, with hybrid cloud and on-prem being the most popular responses. Following that were cloud-native, cloud-enabled, and multi-cloud workloads.
Kiran, who focuses primarily on migrations to EMR, responded to these results noting that he wasn’t surprised. The industry has seen significant churn in the past few years, especially people moving from Hadoop. As clients move to the cloud, EMR continues to lead the pack as a top choice for users.
Migration goals
As a follow-up question, we conducted a second poll to learn about the migration goals of our attendees. Are they prioritizing cost optimization? Seeking greater visibility? Boosting performance? Or are they looking for ways to better automate and decrease time to resolution?
Unsurprisingly, the number one migration goal was reducing and optimizing resource usage. Cost is king. Kiran explained the results of an IDC study that followed users as they migrated their workloads from on-premises environments to EMR. The study found that customers saved about 57%, and the ROI over five years rose to 350%.
He emphasized that cost isn’t the only benefit of migration from on-prem to the cloud. The shift allows for better management, reduced administration, and better performance. Customers can run their workloads two or three times faster because of the optimization included in EMR frameworks.
Discover why
Data security and privacy in the cloud
One attendee brought the conversation along by bringing up the questions many clients are asking: How can I be sure of data security? Their priority is meeting regulatory compliance and taking every step to ensure they aren’t hacked. The main concern is not how to use the cloud, but how to secure the cloud.
Kiran agreed, emphasizing that security is paramount at AWS. He explained the security features AWS implements to promote data security:
1. Data encryption
AWS encrypts data either while in S3 or as it’s in motion to S3.
2. Access control
Providing fine-grain access control using Lake Formation combined with robust audit controls limits data access.<
3. Compliance
AWS meets every major compliance requirement, including GDPR.
He continued, noting that making these features available is good, but it is essential to architect them to meet the user’s or clients’ particular requirements.
Interested in learning more about Unravel for EMR migrations? Start here.