THE DOPPLER EFFECT
When you hear the term “gravity,” what comes
to mind? Sir Isaac Newton and the apple? San-
dra Bullock and George Clooney struggling to
survive outer space in the Warner Bro. sci-fi
production? The tune of John Mayer’s Bill-
board hit? According to NASA, “gravity is the
force by which a planet or other body draws
objects toward its center.”
At CTP, we think of data gravity, a phrase
coined by software engineer Dave McCrory
almost ten years ago. Data gravity takes the
basic concept of gravity and posits that in the
ever-growing cloud and big data environ-
ments, the more data that is accumulated, the
more applications and services that will come
into the data’s orbit to consume it. This is best
accomplished when the applications live close
to the data they are consuming, thus reducing
latency and increasing performance.
This may have been a straightforward process
back when organizations had all their IT
on-premises, but that is not today’s hybrid
cloud reality. Nearly all organizations are host-
ing workloads and data in public cloud envi-
ronments and on-premises or in private host-
ing centers. Some organizations will continue
to migrate all their data to public cloud plat-
forms, but this is not an easy feat, nor the
norm, for several reasons:
1. The bigger the data, the more difficult it
will be to gain portability, simply due to
the time and egress costs associated
with moving that data around.
2. Data protection is more complicated in
the cloud. This is no longer about safe-
guarding the perimeter, but about pro-
tecting the workloads themselves, at
rest and in transit.
3. The changing nature of data sover-
eignty and national data protection laws
require organizations to pay closer
attention to how they are managing
data across borders.
4. The risk to the enterprise may be too
high. Think about moving the core busi-
ness databases to a platform you do not
control. This is a serious conversation
that puts the whole company at risk if it
does not go well.
The spring 2019 edition of The Doppler Quar-
terly looks at the reality of data gravity, and at
how organizations can best achieve the opti-
mum balance o data principle tradeoffs. Start-
ing on page 52, we discuss: use cases where
hybrid cloud might (or might not) present
challenges around data gravity; the data
effects of application portability; data protec-
tion strategies; and the government
restric-tions affecting your data operations.
As your organization navigates the
complexi-ties of a hybrid and multi-cloud
world, we hope our data gravity best
practices help you ask the right questions,
make better decisions and derive increased
value from your data.
Bruce Coughlin
Chief Executive Officer, CTP
SPRING 2019 | THE DOPPLER | 1