Today in London Gartner held day one of its two day Data Centre, Infrastrucuture and Operations Management Summit.

Here is what we learned this morning:

1) Public cloud acceptance by enterprise means more not fewer challenges

2) Asked if security breaches will slow public cloud adoption the consensus was that the answer was no.
However the question over regulation slowing public cloud adoption was considered far more complex – especially in Europe.
Microsoft is working on an approach called Just Enough Admin or Just in time admin.

3) Only 2% of apps have been specifically written for cloud computing. This means that even if the concept of public cloud adoption is no longer feared – the reality of lift and shift is a very long way off and enterprises wishing to migrate existing applications to the cloud will need significant professional services efforts.
The vast majority of the audience who expressed an opinion agreed with the statement: Moving applications from the data centre to the cloud will require significant professional services with 166 respondents saying: ‘Yes.’

4) One attendee told me that part of his motivation for considering moving to the cloud was that the management of his organisation identified the data centre as prime Real Estate and they wanted it to change its use as it was too valuable to house virtual servers.

5) Senior IT people were asked to accept that the more senior they become they more distant they are from their internal customers. In order to deliver successful projects they needed to rethink what they deliver based on ‘Superior Customer Insight and indentifying what customers want by using ‘soft insights’ to overcome

i) Language
ii) Barriers
iii) Understanding the customer story
iv) How the outcome would make them feel