The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge, and cloud has changed how enterprises balance core applications and processing capabilities between public clouds and the edge. Remote branch offices, manufacturing sites, and retail stores are no longer just connecting through a centralized WAN – a good majority of these connections are happening in the […]
Reflecting on Cisco Live 2017, I’m excited about Cisco’s role in shaping the future of digital business. Customers are also excited and want to know what that means for cloud.
Organizations want to know how they can innovate more and deliver new offerings for their users and customers with cloud. As I shared in my last blog, the focus has shifted from making workloads portable or getting the best pricing, to centering on how you can take advantage of the incredible innovation happening in cloud. I’m excited about how Cisco’s differentiated approach is helping customers do just that.
Over the last year, we’ve seen a significant shift in enterprise cloud strategies. What used to be about cost cutting, has become more about how to transform and digitize business. It’s all about innovation. CIOs we talk to are ready to make cloud investments to help solve business problems and bring better business outcomes. While cost is still important, the value they see from cloud goes beyond cost and focuses on how cloud can speed innovation while maximizing security at the best possible cost. If you are viewing cloud through the single lens of cost reduction, you may be missing a bigger opportunity.
Many of you are already working in multicloud environments – a combination of public and private clouds (i.e., AWS, Azure, Google, and on-premise IT). In fact, IDC found that 84% of IT executives surveyed expect to use multiple clouds from multiple cloud providers. Organizations are pursuing multicloud for a variety of reasons including increasing revenue, reducing costs, decreasing time to market, or simplifying IT infrastructure. While a mulitcloud approach can deliver tremendous benefits, it can also create complexity, exposing a gap between the business need for digitization and what IT can reliably and confidently support.
IT has evolved from running and maintaining traditional infrastructures, to a broader role of delivering new business outcomes. Enter Hybrid IT, which recognizes that where workloads run is just one small part of an entire IT infrastructure. More than just hybrid cloud, it’s a strategy that blends cloud and non-cloud capabilities, including networks, end-points, and workloads with the best that cloud can offer in public IaaS and SaaS. Despite recent outages with public cloud, enterprises need to strike a balance.
It’s a complicated world out there, especially when it comes to cloud. Customers are trying to figure out the right cloud strategy, and it isn’t easy. The Amazon S3 outage is an example of just how complex the situation is. While that interruption only lasted four hours, the impacts were felt far and wide. So is public cloud still a viable option? Or course it is. Amazon Web Services published their post-mortem and the issue was human error and fully correctable. Despite this, there is no disputing the reliability of S3 which is on-par or even better than most enterprise storage options. It’s just that since AWS is so large and so pervasive, it makes the news when it fails and when that failure happens, we see multiple systems that all rely on S3 failing at once.
Cloud is a top investment area for digital transformation but why is it that only 3% of enterprises have an optimized cloud strategy? In a recent InfoBrief sponsored by Cisco, IDC categorizes the maturity spectrum of cloud adopting organizations from ad-hoc (beginning awareness and immediacy to adopt) to optimized (mature and delivering IT-enabled products and services).
I’ve spent a lot of time hearing from our customers about cloud adoption and there are three things they all agree on: (1) it’s essential to digitization, (2) not everyone starts the journey in the same place, and (3) there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Some customers need support for new cloud native as well as […]
