CBR headed to this year’s Cloud Expo at the Excel centre in London to ask those in the know their opinion regarding key topics in the world of cloud.
1. Gavin Jackson, Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Services, EMEA, VMware, on cloud disruption.
"Disruption of most enterprises is no respecter of legacy and people that have been in the business for thirty years, a hundred years. Big companies are falling by the wayside because smart companies are somehow disrupting them, using software typically. They’re reaching their customers in the cloud and leveraging data in ways that big companies are too locked down or too stifled by legacy to really bring to bear.
"That disruption is happening everywhere and it’s caused a big change. The big change has been that cloud computing has really had to come to the fore as a delivery model to get the speed that you need to be first to market with new ideas, and to get the scale you need to take advantage of massive data sets and billions of users."
2. Peter Groucutt, MD at Databarracks, on how cloud can help disaster recovery.
"Traditionally disaster recovery (DR) has been all about having the same physical or virtual hardware assets in your DR site as you have in your primary site. So you’re paying basically double your infrastructure costs. With cloud we can say all you need to commit is a really small amount of resource – you only have to pay for 20 or 30 percent of what you’ve got here.
"If your primary site goes down you can elastically increase the resource on the cloud platform. What we’ve essentially been able to do is to say, you’ve got a few hundred thousand pounds of IT here, you don’t want to spend the same amount to protect it in DR. So we give you everything there, we turn it down, we give you enough to replicate and test, and if that goes down we can immediately expand it in terms of capability."
3. Sumeet Sabharwal, Group Vice President & General Manager at Navisite, on the mindset shift in cloud adoption.
"A lot of the underlying tools and underlying capabilities and technology have evolved to the point where it is easy to move into a cloud fairly quickly. The CIOs are a lot more comfortable now.
"Two years ago the question was "is cloud right for us?" Now it’s not a question of whether cloud is right or not. Now it’s a question of how soon, which applications, how do I look at implementing the right strategy, with the right governance, with the right controls and the right security aspects."
4. Nick East, CEO of Zynstra on private vs public cloud.
"It can become a bit of a religious debate, the cloud debate – it should be all here or all there. But if you’re in IT, you have a set of requirements and you want some tools in your toolkit to be able to satisfy those requirements.
"So if someone says, you can only run IT or data in a public cloud, in a data centre some distance from where your office is, that just might not fit your requirement. Regardless of whether it’s policy, security, performance…Anyone who’s being completely religious about it and saying all public is the answer or all private is the right answer is wrong."
5. Metin Algir, Cloud Services Specialist at Sungard Availability Services, on staying relevant.
"It’s about being relevant in your market. The example I give is, ten or fifteen years ago, there may have been a blockbuster video rental store on every corner on the high street. The idea that we’d be watching movies and TV programmes from the internet streamed to our smart devices was a pipe dream.
"Enter Netflix, exit Blockbuster. Netflix is a cloud-native organisation…that’s a new model of being able to serve your customers as and how they are consuming a service."
