When it comes to achieving enterprise digital resilience on hybrid and multicloud platforms, enterprises are confronting a tall order. This was one of several conclusions drawn from a survey compiled last year by 451 Research. The firm contacted over 1,200 global IT decision makers in 2020 and found that while the journey to hybrid and multicloud was clearly in process, organizations were grappling with a number of operational challenges. These included a notable immaturity in resiliency strategies and a data point that 65% of respondents lacked a management plan for hybrid deployment. “Customers continue to struggle with data operations and getting time to insight and time to value,” said Dave Vellante, co-founder and chief research officer at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio. “A critical problem is complexity. Cloud is helpful, but when you try to scale rapidly, other blockers beyond the infrastructure come into play.” SiliconANGLE Media will address these and other challenges on Jan. 27 through a broadcast of the latest installment of Io-Tahoe LLC’s data automation series: “Enterprise Digital Resilience on Hybrid and Multicloud.” Industry experts from Red Hat Inc. and Happiest Minds Technologies Pvt. Ltd. will discuss best practices for managing data across hybrid cloud and multicloud IT environments. Learn how to navigate your journey to hybrid and multicloud platforms for your data and business applications, and gain insights on the latest Io-Tahoe data automation technologies and how the platform’s capabilities are transforming business data security issues globally. Resilience for IT operations is not a new concept, but it took on added importance when businesses were suddenly confronted with a massive scale-up of work-from-home infrastructure at the onset of a global pandemic last year. In the aftermath of this rapidly transformed IT landscape, companies are partnering to develop new solutions to improve data security and bolster digital resilience. In November, Io-Tahoe and Happiest Minds announced a joint effort to provide data discovery and adaptive governance solutions. “Adapting the style of governance to fit the context is a trend that we’re seeing,” said Ajay Vohora, chief executive officer of Io-Tahoe, during an interview with theCUBE last year. “It’s trying to allow background processes to understand what changes are happening with data over time.” Automation plays a key role as well. A study from 451 Research in 2020 found that the leading cause of outages, after hardware failures, was human error. In October, Io-Tahoe launched a new “smart data” partner program to provide machine learning-driven automated data discovery, mapping, cataloging and deduplication across cloud or on-premises data stores. “Lack of talent, data quality, governance, compliance and security edicts all create friction and add to the problem,” Vellante said. “A key is automation and injecting machine intelligence into the data lifecycle. This can not only reduce costs, but accelerate time to value by 50-70% or more.” In addition to governance and automation, IT departments have increasingly focused on security for hybrid and multicloud platforms. This has taken on greater urgency in recent months, as enterprises and governments have dealt with rising ransomware threats and a major breach involving a third-party security software provider. Businesses that use a mix of public clouds or embrace a hybrid model that includes the use of on-premises infrastructure run the risk of vulnerabilities associated with protecting data at rest or shielding data in motion. One solution will not likely be able to address this level of complexity in a multicloud world, so security practitioners advise a multi-pronged approach. “IT organizations need to re-evaluate existing security systems and solutions and should focus on implementing a well-rounded multi-layer and multi-level defense strategy while considering the security in the unified communication landscape,” said Suresh Kanniappan, vice president and customer success manager, infrastructure management and security services at Happiest Minds, in a company post. “Awareness campaigns and training for the employees can minimize the possible threats.” “Resiliency is about ensuring that the actual system state (the number of application instances, for example) matches the desired state at all times, even in the event of failures,” said Fadzi Ushwokunze, technologist and transformative leader, in a post on building application assessments. “Resiliency is the ability of an application, platform, or an entire data center to recover quickly and continue operating even when there has been a major disruption. Ideally, your users would never know there’s been a failure in your stack.”