Storage News

New AWS Collaborations Ease Health IT Cloud Storage Options

AWS collaborates with Qualcomm and Actifio to allow enterprise organizations to make better use of cloud and on-premise storage solutions, along with backup services.

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- Amazon Web Services (AWS) is increasing storage and cloud migration options by collaborating with Qualcomm and Actifio to produce more tailored solutions for organizations looking to improve their IT infrastructure environment. 

AWS cloud storage collaborations.

Qualcomm has just announced their plans to support AWS Greengrass across many of their solutions. AWS Greengrass is a new platform that extends AWS IoT and Lambda for local execution on an organization’s own gateways and devices with the same programming model used in the cloud.

By collaborating with AWS Greengrass, Qualcomm aims to allow organizations the use of both local and cloud-based storage as well as critical IoT applications that cannot rely fully on cloud such as medical equipment and industrial machinery.

The collaboration is expected to support a connection to the cloud in a gateway application containing integrated AWS Greengrass and Qualcomm technology. The technology enables processing at the “edge” of an IoT solution so organizations can benefit from both the cost savings of cloud storage and the reduced latency and privacy of local data storage.

The combination of cloud and on-premise storage allows multiprotocol edge nodes to communicate with the network even when the nodes do not have IP connectivity, giving expanded options to commercial, industrial, and medical solutions to manage their systems using both local and cloud storage.

"Qualcomm Technologies is driving new generations of smart connected edge devices such as 'gateways' to enable edge processing for IoT implementations, especially in industrial, commercial, and medical spaces," said Jeffery Torrance, vice president of business development at Qualcomm Technologies. "Qualcomm Technologies is excited to see AWS, a leader in IoT cloud offerings, launch AWS Greengrass, which is expected to further help customers realize the benefits of IoT edge processing and gateways.”

AWS is also collaborating with the copy data virtualization company, Actifio which just announced the availability of OnVault on AWS as part of their hybrid cloud data management solution. OnVault enables organizations to migrate to AWS faster and easier by extending legacy data center applications and infrastructure to give users instant access to archived data.

"As more of our customers transition their data archives to the cloud, we want to be able to grant them access to that data quickly - anytime, anywhere," said Sabina Joseph, Head of Global Storage Partnerships & Alliances at AWS. "Actifio provides large-scale data virtualization and management tools, and with the new OnVault solution on AWS, our customers can now harness the power of their archived data and use it to help drive further business goals and innovations."

Actifio cites the expense and inconvenience of legacy data duplication solutions as inspiration for solutions like OnVault. Deduplication disk devices used to store data long-term resulted in complex piles of data that were unmanageable and rarely usable. Organizations were unable to conveniently retrieve or use the data collected.

OnVault on AWS encourages the acceleration of big data analytics by combining cloud-based long-term data retention which gives users open access to archived data.

The technology features testability and data recovery, and leveraging of archived data to run analytics on Amazon RedShift without the need for another data migration or redundant data copy.

Many healthcare organizations are challenged by their legacy systems which cannot a support the increase of data brought on by EHRs, IoT devices, and digitized infrastructure. Migrating archived data to the cloud  is not a simple process but vendors such as Actifio understand the need for quick access to data for analytic purposes along with complete backup and recovery solutions enabled by cloud computing.

Healthcare organizations interested in pursuing data analytics solutions using archived data could benefit from a solution like OnVault to quickly migrate archived data to the cloud and provide users with easier access to legacy data.

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