Listen in as Panzura CEO Dan Waldschmidt and Michael Vizard of the Techstrong Group discuss enabling unlimited and faster workloads, technology and storage learnings, and where data management is headed.

A recipe for hybrid cloud

Waldschmidt observes that multi-cloud is being adopted faster than hybrid models because, he feels, what’s needed is a recipe book for hybrid. The foundation for this will be many of the learnings discovered when deploying high performance computing (HPC). See Panzura Recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2023.

“CEOs and CIOs, chief data officers, chief digital officers at large enterprise companies are rooted in the same fundamental principles that guide HPC, which is privacy and security—and then of course that has to be wrapped in a layer of stability and performance. The lessons learned for HPC are definitely the bedrock for how we're building AI and security and privacy models.”

Enterprise provisioning of AI for data management

The rise in AI will certainly force a new conversation about enterprise data management and data storage. Where are leaders going to deploy AI services? Training AI models will take petabytes. Will it be worthwhile? Budgetary insights are going to guide many of these decisions.

“CIOs are reluctant to invest in hybrid when they just don't have a clear status on where data is and what it's doing. I actually think this is a great use of AI for the enterprise,” says Waldschmidt.

AI applied to summarizing files and extracting information so the CIO gains awareness of a silo’s contents could inform decision-making as to which data stays on-prem, which makes better sense as a hybrid workload.

Federated data management

As enterprise workloads get more performant across multiple clouds, centralized and federated data management will give leaders a clearer idea of the status of their data and services. The expanding knowledge gained will help enterprises innovate and grow. See also Making the World a Safer Place for Data with Evolved Visibility and Security (Forbes).

“It's a really positive thing to see more people caring—not just about the bottom-line cost—but [about] the operation itself,” says Waldschmidt. “. . . The engagement of my employees allows me to scale as an operation. That's my strategic advantage: having everyone at the table and then turning all that collaboration into the next generation of who we are as enterprise leaders.”

Data management, company values, and transformation

How do we bring people together in decision-making that affects the entire enterprise? Waldschmidt says the question is the answer.

“What are we trying to achieve? What matters to us most? You might value mission-critical access to data. If you’re an innovator, you might care more about high-risk data and how securely you’re storing it. The conversation itself opens the door to a dialogue around what you value as an organization, and then, what are the steps you can take to transform.

Just the awareness that there's data management potential that we haven't tapped into yet is the starting point.”

Watch the entire broadcast (16 min.).