Will Non-Cloud Networks Even Exist in the Future?

0:00 [Music] welcome to inflection points join hosts

0:08 carlo gazzetti and tim harrison as we explore extreme's vision of the infinite enterprise

0:14 we see a world where people have become infinitely distributed around the globe which means businesses must work at

0:20 scale and focus increasingly on becoming consumer-centric to connect with each

0:25 and every one of them

0:31 [Music]

0:37 carla we're here to talk about cloud yeah we are i think we know one or two

0:43 things about cloud i mean i might spend maybe i don't know 90 of my day talking about cloud maybe maybe 95 maybe maybe

0:52 i feel like you can have a good combo on that i spend most of my time talking to you through cloud so

1:00 because we're in the infinite enterprise that's right that was fantastic

1:06 uh in you know full disclosure uh for anybody who doesn't know um some outlets

1:12 have identified us as uh number two in cloud managed networking and the fastest growing and

1:19 not bad it's not bad it's not bad uh but we are not here to advertise to you um that's

1:26 that's an important part of the podcast is that that's not our goal no but uh we do know quite a lot about it seeing as

1:32 um you know our teams are always thinking about what's next in cloud right that's how you end up being number

1:37 two is uh constantly thinking about what's next and how can we innovate am i right

1:42 you are right um and uh you know a few short years ago if

1:48 you will um uh cloud was uh sort of seen as just another business model another another

1:55 technology another way of of delivering some services but yeah you know certainly with the pandemic what we've

2:01 seen is that cloud has become uh quite a necessity in in the ability to deliver services um and

2:08 you know we've gone through a tipping point if you will on uh an inflection point on on our our use of cloud

2:16 technologies and i think that it's an important time for us to be understanding how this is going to look

2:22 going forward right i i agree because you know i haven't been in technology all of that long i've i've only been

2:28 really you know working in traditional tech now for two years prior to that i was in the media industry and

2:34 you know i think one thing i noticed about cloud you know maybe not that long

2:39 ago in your millennial days in my millennial days as an older elder millennial um i

2:45 would say you know i remember when cloud first happened it was really just about like storage and you know itunes was

2:50 like store your songs in the cloud and even though i knew that napster was in the cloud because yes i'm that old uh i

2:57 hadn't really yes you're that young we did not call it the cloud but it was really just storage back in

3:04 the day and then as time went on i could see that the cloud was becoming more and more

3:10 relevant and it made it easier for me to collaborate with teams from around the

3:16 world whether they were in europe australia asia the united states i used it to manage teams you know major

3:23 products like salesforce all cloud managed and that became table stakes in business

3:28 continuity the way that we collaborated over google became table stakes and you

3:34 can start to see it really become just part and core to everyday business but

3:40 yet it still feels very new and very kind of trendy and you know i i think to your point tim

3:47 i i don't think it's a trend anymore i think it might be here to stay i i think so too and you know i'm possibly

3:54 slightly older than you and maybe we won't talk about that though uh and

4:01 uh we've seen these uh sort of trends and people have seen trends in the industry where we started off with

4:06 centralized computing and then it became decentralized and then there was back to more centralization and now this

4:12 decentralized sort of centralized decentralization if you will you know you're putting your stuff into the cloud and people look at

4:19 the cloud as a as a single sort of um amorphous thing out there um

4:24 but what i think is really important about that is that those who feel that this is all going to swing back to

4:30 everything on prem are missing the point because it's not about placement per se it's about the technologies that

4:37 are used to deliver this so those technologies i feel will continue to expand and and add significantly greater

4:44 value no matter where they live and i just wrote about a blog recently on

4:50 on the extreme network site about service providers and how service

4:55 providers need to change or they'll become irrelevant they need to be able to take advantage of these cloud

5:01 technologies or they're going to find themselves being outpaced not only by their competitors but by their customers

5:07 and i think it's it's it's a huge lesson to learn as we look at these adoptions

5:13 of cloud and where cloud is going to go right and if i mean if massive industries like service providers

5:20 are realizing that they have to go to cloud or we're asserting that they need to go to cloud in order to keep up in

5:26 order to keep pace with everything that's happening as a result of the pandemic and everybody being more

5:31 infinitely distributed and being able to scale um we have to i mean they have it this

5:38 means it's no longer a trend it's a thing it's a cure it's here to stay it's not going to have a pendulum backswing

5:43 we are going to forever leverage this technology in the future and i think what now the question is what does that

5:50 future look like right yeah and and with with the the infinite enterprise and that ability to scale the ability to

5:57 have that uh infinite distribution and a consumer-centric view we now know how it applies to people how

6:04 do we continue to apply that and how does it grow how does it how does it change as we look you know 10 20 50

6:11 years into the future and i know exactly who we should talk to for that crystal ball i think i know who you're talking

6:16 about sir bill lundgren here at extreme networks he is our

6:21 portfolio architecture cloud data and app operations at extreme he's also the pride of wisconsin i'm very excited to

6:29 talk to him me too let's uh let's have that conversation [Music]

6:36 so bill can we talk about cloud and how it's applied today do you see cloud as table

6:43 stakes for any business doing business today absolutely i think it's a a huge part of modern technology

6:52 we've gotten to the point with distributed enterprise and especially during the pandemic we start to see you know efficiencies

6:58 gained with the cloud we start to see people downsizing data centers because now there's less to maintain

7:04 at this point in in the technology evolution cloud makes absolute sense for just about every organization

7:10 so do you think it would be fair to say that in the future you can't survive if

7:15 you have an only on-prem solution i think if you're large enough certainly for small business cloud may not make

7:22 sense just because their needs might not be there but for the for most enterprises um

7:31 the the the need of cloud i think is going to be able to work around the fact that we have a staffing shortage in the world

7:37 right now people aren't working it's hard to find talent so i don't need server folks i don't

7:42 need to worry about procurement all of the chip shortages all of the shipping issues that that happen

7:47 uh right now all go away when you start looking at cloud so it's it is one of those things that for certain businesses yeah might

7:54 not but those are going to be the minority not the majority bill we're cloud believers um at extreme we have

8:01 lots of experience in the cloud we've we've done a lot of work in the cloud and we're looking to continue doing that

8:07 to support businesses but uh help help me and help the rest of the listeners understand um you know what is cloud is

8:14 cloud a business model is cloud a technology architecture what does cloud really mean and and how

8:21 can we define that in such a way that that we have a frame of reference going forward it's a really good question tim

8:27 and and uh you know we've talked earlier about you know i think if you ask 10 different people what cloud is you get 11 different answers uh but the

8:34 uh it is absolutely all of everything that you just mentioned it's it's a business model especially for us here at

8:41 extreme you know there are processes involved in making the cloud a reality both in backend

8:46 processes in front end processes in terms of sales from a business usage perspective

8:52 because here at extreme we use sas services for things like salesforce and marketing tools and things just like

8:59 any other business would so it cloud is really about not a it's an adoption of a

9:05 of a new workflow in your business it's about whether or not you're designing cloud or consuming cloud you're really

9:12 changing the way and the paradigm that you're working within your business not only from a procurement perspective but

9:17 a software maintenance perspective hardware maintenance it's it's really kind of adopting a lifestyle i think

9:23 what's really interesting about what you just said and where my mind immediately jumps to is you know what are some of

9:28 the business outcomes of adopting that style of work for businesses

9:35 one thing that leaps to mind for me is clearly business continuity is one um i

9:40 know we've we briefly talked about before everybody's more distributed right now and cloud is one of the

9:45 easiest ways to do that can you talk a little bit about you know some of the business outcomes that that uh are a result of moving to this

9:53 oh absolutely there are huge impacts that you can do you know i remember back in my enterprise career i worked for an

9:58 insurance company and we spent 10 million dollars building just a data center that wasn't the equipment that

10:04 went in it that was just air conditioning generator and a building because you have to start thinking about

10:09 and it was not a big data center we're talking i think it was just a little under 20 or 30 000 square feet

10:15 so when you start looking at the cost savings of that and looking at what you can do from now you know especially when

10:20 you're to your point is high availability and redundancy and making sure business continuity is there if i

10:26 go off to amazon i instantaneously can build servers that are redundant in two different places and not just it not

10:33 just in a geographic region but across the world i can put a site in europe i can put a site in the u.s i can back up

10:38 i can archive i can do all of this stuff without ever procuring hardware um you

10:44 know and it's it's a matter of minutes sometimes to to do these types of things and then you set it forget it the old

10:49 ron popeil type of scenario where you just you once it's built and once you have someone that knows what they're doing it can be done very very quickly

10:57 and even more importantly it can be scripted it can be automated it can be built around a set of standards to help

11:03 eliminate the human error components of it especially with modern day cloud architecture and orchestration tools so

11:09 there's the cloud does have some distinct advantages over the the legacy hard data

11:15 center in that you just you don't have to worry about having duplicates of everything because you can build it into

11:21 your cloud architecture maybe this is a bit of a basic question and uh you know i'm i'm interested in

11:28 the answer in multiple ways but one the question i'm i'm thinking of is how hard is it to change your workflows so

11:35 we you talked about cloud as a new way uh to have workflows and the workflows need to change for you to be able to

11:41 become a part of the the cloud generation if you will um so how hard is

11:46 it to get from a legacy model into a cloud model oh that's it it can be

11:53 as difficult or as easy as you want it to be the great answer yeah the the uh the iet

12:01 workflows from management perspective do change uh you're now talking about devops and security ops because you're

12:07 now dealing with services that are quite literally in the cloud um so you've got to have some some talent and some skill

12:14 sets that might be a little different than what you traditionally would employ on an on-premises data center um but the

12:21 overall you know once the once that that infrastructure is built the the maintenance of it and the the the usage

12:28 of the applications you know your users that the the actual customers of of your own it operation aren't going to know

12:34 the difference there to them it's just an application they're using so they don't care how you're getting there um

12:40 but just there's some subtle differences i think in in just terms of that generalized it

12:45 maintenance because it is cloud-based and you're going to be somewhat constrained at times around certain

12:51 services a certain capability you know perfect example of that is ipv6 support um and recently you know

12:58 we've been looking at this here at extreme and while aws just recently added some

13:03 support for it google and azure both are still you know there's plans for it but they lag behind

13:08 so you you do have to adapt your it organization sometimes around constraints of the cloud which might not

13:14 exist in an on-premises data center but the good news is the cloud adapts pretty quickly so as long as there's a demand

13:20 for a particular feature within it you usually don't have to wait long in order to get it so what what happens if you're

13:26 not moving to the cloud like if we're if we're looking at you know changing

13:32 how people are doing business like we are obviously our world has changed over the past two years um you know what

13:40 happens to an organization that doesn't move to the cloud what is going to be the impact i think you're going to start to see

13:45 everything that we've got going on right now if you look at the cost of shipping uh my my wife

13:51 actually works in a in a heavy industry with shipping parts on on very large

13:56 container ships uh they bring a bunch of stuff over and what cost three thousand dollars a year or two ago to ship is now

14:04 thirty thousand dollars to bring a container over on a ship wow and when you think about having um

14:10 you know a lot of the manufacturing of these components whether it be servers hard drives you know all all varying

14:17 pieces of you know the right down to the chip level all overseas and then trying to get that hardware your you might not

14:24 be able to move as agilely as you could before the pandemic versus the cloud those servers are

14:30 sitting there you know amazon and microsoft they've got contracts and if it you know they've got

14:35 excess capacity so even if it takes them six months to get a new server it doesn't matter because there's still one

14:41 sitting there waiting for you right now to be able to keep moving forward with your same progress

14:46 so i think anybody who's not cloud is going to very quickly find themselves behind and having to slow their i.t

14:53 development down because of staff shortages because of hardware availability shipping constraints and

14:59 just overall you know the complexity of getting and procuring things in the it industry right now at least until things

15:05 settle down and get somewhat back to normal also too i think it's um you know if we ever have another

15:11 situation we've we've proven very very well that the cloud works when the pandemic hit and everybody

15:18 started working from home you didn't see zoom suddenly say oh sorry we can't handle the load

15:24 you didn't see microsoft go oh everybody stopped for a minute um the business continued

15:30 everybody was able to scale effectively right right absolutely people that used um you know cloud-based uh remote access

15:38 type solutions or were already doing some cloud type things they they didn't have a bit of a problem but if you talk

15:43 to vars who sold traditional you know legacy uh box based

15:49 let's say vpn solutions for instance their phones lit up like christmas trees because they're oh my god i have 500

15:56 people working from home and i have 100 licenses on this device you know i need to unlock it and and you know some of

16:02 our extremes competitors were doing wonderful things for customers giving them you know temporary licenses to get

16:07 by until they could you know cut the pos and there's a lot of good spirited things that happened in the industry but

16:13 you know again when you're fixed on localized hardware that can be problematic

16:19 right so so scale is a massive game changer when it comes to cloud

16:25 the ability to distribute that amongst different clouds or even different areas around the world to be

16:32 able to address the needs of the user uh in different regions it sounds like you know the

16:38 cloud effectively has has taken away a lot of the constraints around somebody who's built themselves into a particular

16:45 data center or a particular architecture it really it's it's a hundred percent scale both horizontal and vertical um

16:52 because if you look at your traditional i want to spin up an application uh when you do that on physical hardware

16:58 in a physical data center you've now got that server and you hope that it's big enough well what happens if your

17:04 application's really great and suddenly everybody and their brother wants to use it well now you're buying bigger servers

17:10 right versus cloud i can stop the instance move it to a bigger instance turn it back on again and the only thing

17:15 i've really done is a brief interruption and a bigger bill so it does give you the extreme flexibility

17:22 and what's really great about cloud and what we like with our dev our own development is the fact that

17:27 you effectively have a license to screw up what i mean by that

17:33 is you have the ability to gamble so if i come up with an idea and i want

17:39 to know if it's going to work we can go off in a test environment and spin one up in minutes we can test it for pennies

17:45 quite literally i could spend 20 bucks for an afternoon spin up a whole bunch of servers test it and go that's a really great idea this

17:52 might actually work or oh you know that's really not a great idea we should just forget about this and i've spent 20

17:58 bucks versus going to the boss and buying servers and discs and storage only to figure out that your idea really

18:04 doesn't work um so from an r d perspective and a a of keeping velocity of innovation there

18:10 cloud i think is is absolutely on the forefront of that well and i i think you really you just hit exactly what i was

18:16 thinking which is it allows for a velocity of innovation um and it sounds to me pretty much that

18:23 as we started out this conversation cloud is basically table stakes for business at this moment in time and i

18:30 think that the pandemic is just increased adoption of it for all the reasons that you've just outlined but my

18:35 big question is where do you see this going how is all of this innovation this speed of

18:41 business and also everything that's changed about our day-to-day because of the pandemic

18:48 what what holds in the future for cloud because i think a lot of people think it might be fairly mature at this point in

18:53 time where do we go from here and what else is out there in the next 10 20 50 years

19:00 oh that's uh that's wow look into your crystal ball and tell me all you know yes yes so

19:06 i think you know the traditional business you know for for large service providers we've been working in the world of containerization and micro

19:12 services and and kubernetes for a number of years now uh traditional

19:18 business is still very much vmware centric and virtualized application centric so i think you know the future

19:25 of cloud is as adoption increases uh one of the best ways you can get your bang for the buck is is much like we did in

19:32 traditional data center you know you had server after server after server running individual apps and then

19:38 vmware and virtualization came along and everyone started buying you know half as many servers and putting twice as many

19:44 apps on them well now we can get even further efficiencies if businesses are willing to adopt

19:51 the kubernetes and container driven environments the problem with those environments is they can be somewhat

19:56 difficult to set up unless you're in cloud and with cloud there's all sorts of auto magic services

20:02 that you can just enable like amazon the the kubernetes services that they have

20:08 you can just turn them on and start loading containers and poof it's all just kind of magic

20:14 so it saves in that regard to to being able to optimize and efficiencies so i

20:19 think you know crystal ball is further clouded option further adoption of containerization businesses starting to

20:25 look at optimizing their in-house applications to run even in a lot of times serverless

20:31 environments where you have workloads that are not necessarily critical maybe something that needs to run every so

20:37 often you don't need a server to run those you can mod you can modernize with cloud environments do serverless compute

20:44 to where you just pop these things off every so often and you're paying pennies on the dollar to have a process execute

20:51 and give you this reliable you know processing also too i think you know if we start to

20:56 look at the future as more and more data goes to cloud you start to get more and more of a

21:02 target on your back it's much like in the old days when people would buy max because there's aka no viruses for a mac

21:08 only works until everybody has a mac right so you know if your if your idea is i'm

21:15 going to reduce my security footprint by putting everything in the cloud and hiding it well that only works so often

21:22 or so far before the the people that that are really good at getting in

21:27 start trying to own amazon or own azure we've already seen this happen with the

21:32 solarwinds attacks and some of these other attacks that have occurred so i think security is going to be on the forefront of innovation here in terms of

21:40 optimization of containers tools and and facilities to tell you what's going on log what's going on um

21:48 also to encryption is going to become more and more important things like homomorphic encryption and more widespread adoption of tools like that

21:55 to allow you to encrypt data but still use the data in its encrypted

22:00 format and get results in an encrypted format and have software still work without truly decrypting the data um all

22:07 of those types of things are going to become more and more important this cloud evolves and i think too

22:14 you know we start to look at all of the different players in cloud they're all very similar but have enough

22:19 subtle differences to where yeah you might want to run something in azure or you might want to run something in aws

22:25 well what if you want to run something in both of them now you're maintaining two cloud environments and now you need

22:30 staff that's trained in two different clouds right so the you know as we revolve it will be interesting to see

22:36 what the industry does in terms of standardization unification and maybe

22:41 even a little bit of inter-cooperation so that i can have a manager of cloud or

22:46 a cloud of clouds if you will or something along those lines out of clouds yes the layered clouds

22:53 stratosphere or something but that that i think is going to become

22:58 important as well as as we start to look at some of these the evolutions

23:03 quick question about that in particular bill like there are there are applications out there that allow you to

23:08 orchestrate different clouds but that doesn't necessarily mean that workloads work equivalently across

23:16 different clouds so when you talk about um a cloud of clouds what do you foresee

23:23 as being the um the actual cloud of clouds what would that look like to you how would how would you

23:29 describe that if you would i think it's going to come down to what the industry has already started to do

23:35 and that is apis api api api is give me a centralized

23:42 architecture that i can use to command workloads across

23:47 all the platforms without having to learn how does microsoft do this how does oracle do this how does ibm do this

23:53 just uh essentially an open api or an open config-like universally standardized api that will

24:00 allow me to programmatically start stop and manage workloads you know kubernetes gives us some of that flexibility

24:06 because it is at least a unifying standard but not but it's all of the infrastructure building pieces the the

24:13 things similar like terraform that can build and construct this these these things and then manage those workloads

24:20 are still very much um provider specific so if we get uh get to a point of that of that cloud of clouds

24:27 it would simply be a way of unifying and linking the workloads together so that i can

24:32 i can create and and build that infrastructure but at the same time

24:38 monitor that infrastructure that's going to become more and more important is now that you have these loads in places

24:43 where you can't necessarily see if the lights are on how do you how do you determine that because

24:48 if it takes me 15 minutes to get notified from amazon that their data center overheated

24:54 which actually happened uh here a few months ago they had a amazon had an outage just like microsoft's had outages

24:59 but you know amazon overheated a data center in tokyo and parts of their data center went down well it takes them time

25:05 to understand what that issue is take some time to notify you what that issue is um and by the time you get notified well

25:11 now you're 10 minutes into wondering hey dude where's my computer

25:17 so we need to have far more rapid respect just like you would in your own data center right if something

25:23 suddenly went down you'd just walk downstairs or walk over and open the door and see what's going on we don't have that visibility right now in the

25:29 cloud at least an immediate real-time response it sounds like there's still

25:34 quite a bit for us to learn in the cloud and particularly a lot of work to do around security

25:40 but in a world where we've solved these problems and what the future looks like obviously 5g and connectivity play a

25:47 huge piece in making sure that in ensuring the success of cloud particularly as we

25:52 end up being more and more distributed in the future but i guess my question to

25:58 you is is what is life like where everything is cloud-based where you can

26:05 work from anywhere you can shop from anywhere you can have that experience from from anywhere and you have the

26:11 level of connectivity to provide a really you know hyper individualized experience

26:17 what is what is life like and do you think the cloud is going to be able to scale for that sort of future

26:22 i absolutely think it can scale uh it's going to take uh an adoption though uh like we were

26:27 talking about earlier is it needs to become table stakes so that every business every ins

26:33 every possibility is accounted for by by using that cloud data but that is the beauty of it is once

26:39 it's in a place where as long as i have connectivity i should be able to get to it now you're talking about ubiquitous

26:46 access you're talking about your refrigerator being able to have you know remind your telephone that you need to

26:51 buy this at the store you're talking about just this you know i don't want to say utopia uh because it's a blessing

26:58 and a curse right you're not you now have no excuse to disconnect um or or to tell the boss you know i i was

27:04 in a place where there was a dead spot now you don't have that anymore yeah the pager doesn't work though sorry no

27:11 wi-fi on the plane can't talk to you yeah remember pagers build nice well that you know that's a perfect example

27:17 uh carlos is the the idea of well the you know the airplanes now that starlink is becoming uh popular

27:23 you know the military's done tests with elon musk starlink and they're they were proving out six and seven hundred

27:30 megabits on in a moving aircraft so to be able to deliver that kind of data rate and and in a moving aircraft

27:37 that's moving 600 miles an hour is amazing so as we start to get faster and better and more especially you know

27:43 wireless is going to be that driver to to that utopian kind of uh

27:49 data access methodology is because now i can i can be anywhere i can do anything from any device and

27:55 still get the same speeds as my laptop i mean that's that that kind of access is going to give us

28:01 just i think a much broader capability for you know especially things like you know

28:07 self-driving cars until as much as i love the idea of a car that can drive itself let's put it this way

28:14 until every car is self-driving you'll never account for the fact that there's going to be some goober that's going to be you know fumbling in his seat looking

28:20 for the penny drop how do you how do you program a car for that you know you you need to have

28:26 access so that every car can talk to every other car and there's got to be some way of controlling that which again

28:31 is cloud so it's it's it's connectivity and it's it's the business continuity of keeping it up and the infrastructure in

28:38 the cloud that's going to enable these these new technologies now specifically to that um and you know

28:44 i wouldn't want to cast aspersions on any self-driving car making companies but um you know as as there is that

28:51 journey and we look at the the utopian refrigerator of the future um what is

28:56 the limitation that's that's causing uh some limited adoption in certain parts of the the business world that that are

29:03 still sort of struggling with virtualization is it the availability of applications is it resistance to wanting

29:09 to give up control of that what what holds us back from this this utopian future

29:15 it's i more so you do the latter part is that willing to willingness to give up

29:20 the control there is a self-preservation i think in i.t of you know as long as there's a

29:26 data center i have a job um that and people see that you know that hey there's no more servers in my data

29:32 center so therefore they're not going to need me i think that's that's a that's a wrong way to look at it i think if if

29:38 you're in it right now and you don't have cloud skills get them it's not hard to go out and get certified or it's not

29:44 hard to figure out you know like how they mean it's not it's still a computer right it's still the cloud is is that old joke you're

29:50 using someone else's computer but you're using it with with a lot more bells and whistles uh but it's a hundred percent letting go

29:58 of that data and understanding that you're not in possession of it there's nothing to go down in the data center and hug there's no more breathing

30:04 there's no blinky lights but even on top of that and kind of bolding into that is is the security aspect of

30:10 it it's there's been so many very very public um hacks lately uh and and more

30:16 and more and more of these ransomware type things and and people are getting way you know now you have states and you

30:21 don't have to worry about this the script kitty it's the state sponsored stuff that just terrifies people right and

30:27 trusting your data to someone else just much like the the solarwinds issue right is you you trust that when you download

30:33 a piece of software it's not going to be have a piece of secret code that's been signed by a certificate

30:38 so you know the the fact that you're now trusting your data and literally the livelihood of your business your ability

30:44 to order product ship product manage your machinery manage your time scale your timetables and and payroll and

30:51 benefits you put all that in the cloud and then it gets compromised that's a big deal and so there are

30:57 people people that just don't want to let go of that yet or they're worried that there are

31:03 issues if they do or or who's responsible for keeping that data private and then two you have the fact that uh

31:09 the big players in this industry can be somewhat competitive with certain businesses i mean if i'm a retailer the

31:15 last person i want to give my money to is amazon definitely so you know or even google

31:22 now is is that is some of the retailers see google as a direct competitor which leaves me with

31:28 microsoft so there's there is some of that too is is uh the biggest players in this space are sometimes direct

31:34 competitors for the people that want to use the product well i think we've covered a lot of ground

31:39 already in just you know our short time together but i i think one thing that we always try

31:44 to leave everybody with is you know there's a lot to consider as businesses are taking on cloud and trying to

31:52 integrate it either in some small way or in some large way into their day-to-day

31:58 and bill just as our our last question uh to you what do you think is the most important

32:03 first step if you're a business that's struggling with uh cloud adoption or you

32:08 have security concerns where is the easy first entry point for any business

32:14 oh that's a great one is the first step i would tell people to do if you're looking at migrating all of your

32:19 workloads is to understand what those workloads are look at and fully know what systems you

32:25 have and then prioritize the ones that are the oldest prior prioritize the ones that are the least impact um so the the

32:33 the maintenance system or something that's you know it's still important to your business but it won't cause you to not ship product

32:39 and start small move those first few little old workloads where the server is dying and it's been you know needing to

32:46 be replaced what i like to call you run it till it rusts in the rack you know those types of machines are

32:52 the perfect candidate to move over to those workloads and to cut your teeth on managing it understanding it and and

32:59 seeing what can happen and then move to bigger and bigger and bigger machines and and bigger services that

33:06 are more important the the other thing is to look at is how are you getting to the cloud because remember you're moving

33:11 your data loads to another facility you don't have it doesn't matter what kind of high speed connectivity you have

33:17 between your offices you now are relying on the internet or preferably some kind of direct

33:23 connect to that cloud service so you're going to have to understand how am i getting there what types of investment

33:29 do i need to make in either standard internet bandwidth or dedicated bandwidth to my new cloud provider and

33:35 then make sure that your employees know that this is not the end of their job this is not some

33:41 way of of getting rid of them you're still going to need that talent you're still going to need people to run those systems they just need to take up a new

33:47 skill in terms of now they need to be able to run the cloud instead of just know how to run windows

33:54 and if you can make that transition with your employees with start with some basic workloads and then make sure you

33:59 have good connectivity to get there it will be a relatively easy transition

34:04 great so first and foremost migrate your rusty racks to the cloud

34:09 yep make sure your employees are upskilled and um you know think about your

34:15 connectivity and your investment there i mean those seem like three easy steps yep it doesn't take much once you get

34:21 those out of the way that's fantastic well thank you very much bill we really appreciate your insights on this uh the

34:26 future is uh is utopian for my refrigerator and uh i look forward to being safe on the roads yes don't forget

34:33 the self-driving cars perfect thanks so much bill thanks guys [Music]

34:44 carla are you convinced uh yes i am thoroughly convinced uh that

34:50 uh cloud is and not a trend it is a thing it is a thing yes i agree

34:56 um and i i admit that i may have been convinced prior to this but uh

35:02 i think what i heard uh continues to reinforce uh the idea that this is indeed a thing

35:09 it is and also it is key to the infinite enterprise

35:14 right i mean one thing that we we definitely covered and and bill reiterated time and time again is

35:21 that in order to scale in order to work with uh distributed resources and distributed teams you have to have the

35:28 cloud this is just the way it's going to be but i like the fact that you know there's some clear steps on on what to

35:34 do yeah yeah he he absolutely gave us sort of the directions for those who haven't

35:39 made it to cloud yet and how they can get there from here which is fantastic because sometimes we talk about cloud in

35:46 such a nebulous way uh without actually focusing on you know what are the practical ways to get there and then

35:53 that takes us into how do those technologies enable us in the future there are things that we haven't really

35:59 conceived of yet that will that will get us there the the cloud of clouds if you will the ability to uh stop looking at

36:07 clouds as isolated things within uh you know that sort of space out there but

36:13 into something that can be manipulated and controlled and leveraged uh from the

36:19 the organization anywhere we need it so i think that that that direction is really exciting to hear about how we can

36:25 make that a utility for the the consumer to be able to to leverage as they need yeah exactly it's just making it more

36:32 tangible and i i think every business has to make the decision between you know what are what our legacies are

36:38 and what's rusty and what are you gonna move but um i i think that um yeah

36:44 the story's done here it is a thing cloud look into it

36:49 you may want to check it out yeah yeah it's gonna happen that's fantastic

36:55 well that's it for this episode of inflection points [Music]

37:05 join us on our next episode of inflection points where we take to the skies for a discussion about drones have

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