Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Leah Schoeb, Jack Bailey, and Trevor Pott for a conversation all about connectivity to and within the cloud. They discuss single points of failure, business continuity, and security in an increasingly interconnected world.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[02:07] Connectivity is critical. What should customers look for to ensure their connections to their cloud providers have eliminated single points of failure?

Topic 2

[13:36] Do most customers view their cloud assets to be an extension of their core data center? How should they ensure the security of data during transport?

Topic 3

[19:21] Software-Defined WAN is becoming a popular way to connect things these days. How do SD-WAN technologies fit into the connectivity to or between clouds?

Cloud Bites

[01:13] “The performance, the capabilities of the cloud, do not matter if you do not have solid, reliable, and secure connectivity.” – Jack Bailey

[02:40] “A lot of folks do not spend enough time thinking about their single points of failure.” – Leah Schoeb

[05:04] “It’s a pretty big job to make sure that you stay connected and redundancy is very important.” – Leah Schoeb

[07:28] “Companies definitely need to plan out, not just redundancy in their own primary network, but redundancy from a perspective of: if we’re in a DR scenario, how do my remote users connect and what options do I have to make sure they have continued connectivity during that event?” – Jack Bailey

[09:17] “It’s now no longer so much about whether you can connect to multiple different things, but it’s how you’re stitching it all together.” – Trevor Pott

[09:46] “This is really moving the discussion away from just raw connectivity options over to management, and especially to automation and orchestration.” – Trevor Pott

[13:11] “They have a lot of security that they have to deal with, so they’re not able to save things locally on their devices, so connectivity becomes even more important because now that worker cannot do any work at all unless they have that reliability of connectivity.” – Leah Schoeb

[16:05] “Things like MPLS, VPLS, SD-WAN components, are becoming much more of a driving force for customers that I see day-to-day because they realize of the need to extend their environments.” – Jack Bailey

[20:12] “A secure SD-WAN usually has some form of quality of experience which allows you to make use of the limited bandwidth you happen to have at that site and make sure that the specific applications that you need get the quality that they’re requiring.” – Trevor Pott

[22:44] “You’ll find that technology is not just looking at a one to one – you’ve got five people in the office, so you only need 5 connections. You’re going to have 5 people in the office, but then you’re going to have 25-30 connections in some cases, because of just the way we work today.” – Leah Schoeb

[26:27] “I think a lot of the innovation in networking and in cloud connectivity is going to come from is moving that security directly into the network.” – Trevor Pott