Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Jon Hildebrand, Shannon Kuehn, and Luigi Danakos for a conversation around the concerns customers have with trusting cloud providers. They discuss how to evaluate a cloud provider based on trust, whether or not an outage should be considered a complete breach of that trust, and what to do if you simply can’t find a provider that is trustworthy. Whether you’re searching for the right cloud provider or listening to this episode, we recommend you start by dipping your toe into the water — the trust should follow. 

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[02:29] What are the important things customers should be on the lookout for when they’re concerned about whether or not they can trust a cloud provider?

Topic 2

[10:48] Outages are inevitable in IT, even in the cloud. Should an outage by the cloud provider be considered a complete breach of trust? Is there any reason to trust a provider that has had a service disruption?

Topic 3

[17:09] I’ve run into customers who say they don’t trust the cloud. What can or should those customers do if they simply can’t trust any cloud provider?

Cloud Bites

[04:08] “You’ve got to ask as many questions as possible. It’s kind of like interviewing for a job. If you’re not asking questions of the place that you’re looking at, you’re not really basing your decision on some of the factors that impact your business day to day. So you have to be an active participant.” — Jon Hildebrand 

[09:16] “I think in some cases it’s not necessarily the trust of an organization with a cloud provider. I think it’s a trust within levels of an organization to realize what they’re using and what they’re potentially moving towards when it comes to utilizing the cloud.” — Jon Hildebrand 

[11:04] “Transparency is key. And I think what you’re seeing right now related to the cloud vendors is they are also kind of moving forward in that realm.” — Shannon Kuehn

[12:03] “Nobody’s immune unfortunately. So I think transparency is key and I guess it’s up to the customer if that level of transparency is efficient enough or sufficient enough. I think that’s where it really starts to become a trickier conversation. When the customer feels like not enough was being communicated then they may very well stay on-prem or they may very well pick a different vendor.” — Shannon Kuehn

[14:20] “To think that something would have to be so bad that you would put it in the cloud and then bring it back because of a breach of trust, I mean, you would have to have some sort of major incident.” — Jon Hildebrand 

[17:53] “It’s really about changing the mindset of people. Cloud is great for certain things, but it’s also bad for certain things. If you don’t trust the cloud, how can you change your mindset in your IT organization to think differently?” — Luigi Danakos 

[18:33] “As far as trusting cloud providers goes, I think you have to start small, start with some small workloads and see if it actually is a fit for your organization.” — Luigi Danakos 

[19:41] “When it comes to it, I think asking somebody, “why don’t you trust the cloud?” is going to be a very open ended answer. And unfortunately, I think what you’re going to end up getting is a lot of generalizations back.” — Jon Hildebrand 

[20:31] “Experimenting with other SaaS-based applications as a replacement for on-prem, then maybe some of those reasons for the cloud not being trusted start to erode a little bit, because you’re starting to prove some of them wrong.” — Jon Hildebrand 

[21:50] “The number one reason people don’t trust the cloud is people. People. People are scared.” —  Luigi Danakos 

[25:54] “That’s where a lot of the negative sentiments surround themselves. The idea that you want to try and move everything. Well, did you even do an assessment? Do you even know what you have? Do you have any inventory of the systems that you’re running? And I feel like nine times out of ten customers don’t know what they have.” — Shannon Kuehn

[27:25] “Start with the smaller, low hanging fruit, and have those great wins. Don’t start with your most complex solution because it will probably bite you.” — Shannon Kuehn