IT Pro Takes a Real World Journey to the AWS Cloud

A Journey to the AWS Cloud

IT pro Jake Burns stopped by theCUBE studios recently to share his story about a journey to the AWS cloud. Jake is Vice President of Cloud Services at Live Nation Entertainment, based in Los Angeles, CA. As head of cloud services for the company, Jake and his team are in charge of infrastructure for IT, including cloud infrastructure, as well as the move to the cloud, which was completed in early 2017. He’s also responsible for enterprise messaging, which includes corporate email, DNS, database services and storage management.

Cloud Push: Top Down or Bottom Up?

I asked Jake where the impetus came for taking a journey to the AWS cloud– was it from the corner office– “thou shalt move to cloud;” or was it an IT-led initiative? He told me it started off as a bottom-up push. For a number of years he had wanted to get the company involved in public cloud, at least at some level. But, it really didn’t take off until the CEO put forth a mandate to get 100% to the public cloud. This came in 2015, catalyzed by a goal to modernize all of IT.