Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Stu Miniman, Jonathan Pierce, and Joe Houghes for a conversation about the concerns customers have with losing control of the infrastructure. They discuss why customers are so concerned about giving up control, the paradoxical benefits to doing so, and what to look for in a cloud provider. As it turns out, the best thing we can do with control is let it go — oh the irony!

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[02:55] In my live polling at VMUGs a couple of years ago, losing control was a top-3 concern when adopting cloud. Bigger than other items like trust, compliance, and connectivity. Why do you think this was such a big concern, when one of the biggest advantages of moving to the cloud is not having to manage lower levels of the infrastructure?

Topic 2

[10:40] How can customers deal with their concern that they no longer control the lower levels?

Topic 3

[16:23] When evaluating a cloud provider, what should customers be looking for to better understand what they still have to control and how much visibility they get into the things they don’t control?

Cloud Bites

[01:54] “I was one of the people that was most concerned about loss of control and moving to the cloud. It kept me up late at night, scared. And I’ve finally embraced it.” — Jonathan Pierce 

[03:06] “There are some things that people, you know, maybe they’re not as good at it as they think.” — Stu Miniman

[04:31] “There’s very few companies that should be pouring concrete and figuring out power and cooling.” — Stu Miniman

[06:14] “There are those big mindsets that need to change and we know in IT oftentimes it’s not the technical hurdles, but is all those, you know, the layer eight and nine up on the stack is the politics, the organizational challenges that we have.” — Stu Miniman

[09:06] “Does your company make better widgets or more widgets based on you being a better, or the best, Exchange administrator in the world? No. You know what’s a really good decision for your company? Paying the five or seven dollars a month to make that Microsoft’s problem.” — Joe Houghes

[12:23] “Moving to the cloud, it just made everything, I wouldn’t say easier, but simpler. That loss of control means I don’t have to fix the cloud outage. I don’t have to scramble on Google trying to figure out what this error code means. And that’s been awesome.” — Jonathan Pierce

[15:18] “Our number of issues have gone down so tremendously. I’d say by 90 percent. Where we had teams of analysts just working tickets, working issues, problem tracking. So now we’re not worrying so much about that, that we’re more focused on building a better box, providing better healthcare, being more innovative, and it’s really been amazing to transform.” — Jonathan Pierce

[16:13] “It’s awesome. And I was completely against moving to the cloud. What a fool I was.” — Jonathan Pierce

[16:53] “I would say the dashboards, the monitoring and reporting for the cloud platforms or any service that you’re consuming itself are very important.” — Joe Houghes 

[17:29] “Go look at those status pages and see how good they are reporting when things are down, what the availability is of them overall over the last week versus month versus year, and see how granularly they break down that information.” — Joe Houghes

[21:06] “All the SLAs that you are given from a cloud vendor are going to be for the platform or the service that you’re consuming. It’s not your data. It’s not the accessibility of how you built your application. It’s just that the platform will exist that you can run this on.” — Joe Houghes

[22:46] “If you can get a managed service provider to take that off your plate, absolutely go for it. It allows you to focus on the business and that’s the most important thing, not doing DR exercises once a year. No one is going to be an expert doing it once a year.” — Jonathan Pierce 

[25:41] “The loss of control can actually be turned to your advantage in a new way.” — Stu Miniman