True or false? Multicloud computing means moving applications to different infrastructure environments, and containers’ virtualized method for running distributed applications neatly solve the whole multicloud mess by making apps portable across clouds.

They are both basically true — if one looks only at the application part of a workload. The data is the other part, and it has its own multicloud portability challenges.

“That is not multicloud, because you’re forgetting about the data and the iceberg underneath the ocean of this colossal amount of data,” said David Richards (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of WANdisco PLC. 

The definition of multicloud popularized by vendors is: Put some apps into containers and shuttle them to some some other environment. Then — presto, we’ve got the same applications running in two different clouds. But it conveniently leaves out the data, according to Richards. Is there a solution that can do for data what containers do for apps?

Richards sat down with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, for a CUBEConversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed data consistency for multicloud portability. 

Replication out; consistency in

Some of the old solutions to data portability — like replicating and relational databases — don’t cut it anymore, according to Richards. “If I’ve got petabyte-scale, multi-terabyte-scale data sets, and I need to run the same applications — or different applications — but against the same data set, I need guaranteed consistent data,” he said.

We live in a live data world now, Richards explained. That means humongous data sets that are also updating and changing at a fast clip in multiple cloud locations. Consider transactional systems where 10 to 50 percent of the data set changes all of the time. That creates a humongous problem moving data among different locations. 

“That’s the precise problem that WANdisco solves,” Richards said. The company’s LiveData offering provides data consistency and accessibility across environments.

Richards cites the experience of one customer in healthcare. “They were able to move petabytes-scale data from their on-premises systems into the cloud, without any interruption to service, without any blocking,” he said. “Our pipeline’s now full of companies all trying to do that.”

The closest competitor on the market is Google Cloud Platform’s Spanner distributed database, Richards pointed out. “The trouble with that is, it only works on their own proprietary network, against their own proprietary applications,” he said. “This is a pure software solution that can work over the public internet. So we can do that for any cloud vendor and any provider of applications.” 

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: WANdisco PLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither WANdisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE