Episode Summary

iland Cloud Technologist Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Tom Hollingsworth, Eric Lee, and Lauren Malhoit for a timely discussion about cloud connectivity. They discuss the challenges involved in connecting disparate clouds, micro-segmentation in the cloud, and staying connected in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[04:05] As customers increasingly use multiple clouds, what challenges and solutions exist with connecting these disparate clouds together to form a single technology infrastructure?

Topic 2

[12:21] When cloud is used within an organization, connectivity during disaster recovery and business continuity events can be very different. What is your recent experience with keeping the workforce connected during the forced work from home event and, in particular, how was the cloud helpful or a hindrance in these efforts?

Topic 3

[24:53] On-premises data centers are starting to adopt microsegmentation to divide up their network to avoid lateral movement by compromising entities. Is this a common feature available in the cloud today?

Cloud Bites

[02:17] “The cloud is kind of exciting to me because it turns the model that we’ve spent so many of our months and years learning on its head. We’re not as concerned about east and west traffic inside of our data center any more everything seems to be flowing out to the cloud.” – Tom Hollingsworth

[05:00] “We were already on a parallel track to develop a technology to connect branches and headquarters that just happened to be the perfect answer to this, and that would be SD-WAN.” – Tom Hollingsworth

[05:43] “What you get is the ability to deploy virtual SD-WAN appliances in a cloud provider and then you can connect to that SD-WAN appliance and get your data in the cloud. And it’s wonderful. It’s magical. It’s almost like it was built for that.” – Tom Hollingsworth

[06:21] “There are still parts of the world that if you ‘OTV,’ you summon a very small demon that will then zip all around the world and cause all kinds of massive problems.” – Tom Hollingsworth

[11:28] “There’s a bunch of people and processes that really slow down achieving this more than the technology itself.” – Eric Lee

[18:50] “When you start connecting that into instances running in the public cloud you start running into VPC limitations, you start talking about ingress and egress charges. It really changes the architecture of everything and once you move one component of that architecture, it’s like tipping over a domino and sometimes you know how many else are going to fall until you start talking to all the other teams.”  – Eric Lee

[21:47] “‘Oh, but the cloud’s so expensive and that won’t happen to us again.’ And I’m literally sitting here going, ‘You’ve called the literal thunder on top of your organization, because you only think about things when they’re good, you don’t remember having your car wallpapered with house insulation because a mile-wide wind storm obliterated everything you worked on.'” – Tom Hollingsworth

[28:24] “Micro-segmentation requires really deep knowledge of application dependencies. it’s going to take months and months.” – Lauren Malhoit

[30:08] “I think that what we’re seeing, not necessarily is just micro-segmentation, but this idea of policy driven networking in general.” – Tom Hollingsworth

[31:23] “Just because it is talking doesn’t mean it should be talking.” – Eric Lee