It’s exciting and rewarding to learn from the CIOs on their perspective of a situation. We were fortunate to have a CIO panel discussion on the topic of how they are planning to leverage the public cloud.
Here is the summary of that discussion (in no particular order of priority):
- Hybrid Cloud is here to stay
- Most organizations will consume some cloud services such as object storage, compute, data warehouse, PaaS databases. It will be rare for a thriving organization not to use any cloud services.
- Innovation in the Cloud is happening at a furious pace. CxO’s worry more about *how to optimally* use the Cloud, vs. just *use of Cloud*
- It’s not about just the costs !!!
- CIOs will adopt cloud *NOT* just because it will lower the cost. CIOs will adopt cloud because of better scale, agility, and speed of innovation, which delivers higher-level business objectives.
- Better Cost Accountability in the Cloud
- Use of Cloud is forcing businesses to have clarity on actual costs by each LOB. There is no more hiding behind on-premises limitations of not being able to report on LOB costs. This creates transparency, forcing LOB’s to be more accountable and efficient.
- Better Security
- Most enterprises realize that they just don’t have the brainpower that the cloud vendors have to harden the network, storage, access policies, authentication, key management, encryption at rest, encryption in motion, and sensitive data detection, etc.
- Cloud lock-in concerns
- Multi-cloud is a necessity, and cloud lock-in is a major concern. “Democratization of Data,” i.e., ability to take data anywhere, is one of the critical questions organizations discuss internally while picking a cloud vendor.
- Some enterprises might leverage different clouds for different applications or use cases. For example, different applications using different components in various clouds such as AWS Aurora, Google BigQuery, Azure SQL, and Oracle Exadata cloud.
- While PaaS databases add a ton of value, enterprises are also wary of using PaaS databases because it leads to lock-in. It won’t be easy to get the data out of those databases to some other cloud vendor.
- Contracts and Billing
- In the current economic climate, the 3-5 year contracts might not happen at the same rate as the past. One year, pay-per-use will be the norm.
- Billing from some of the cloud vendors is complicated to decipher and understand.
- Cloud Backup, DR, and Analytics
- Reduce data center footprint with a modern data management platform that can deliver cloud backup & cloud DR.
- Reuse the backups for DevOps and Analytics.
- Pick an architecture that uses cloud object storage for backup, DR, and even analytics.
- Also, look for a platform that can give complete flexibility such as product and a SaaS offering, perpetual and subscription pricing models, on-premises, and hybrid cloud models.
CIOs believe that their organizations can accelerate innovation and reduce costs by picking the right cloud for the proper use case and application.