Episode Summary

Rob Stabile, Tom Hollingsworth, and Trevor Pott join Brian Knudtson to talk about Connectivity, how it’s changed in recent years, and what is the most important aspect: Connectivity, security, locality, scale, or a careful balance all of them? And how does IT get there?

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:34] What are the common ways to connect these securely and ensure that these distributed locations can talk to each other without concerns of data loss?

Topic 2

[10:07] Given the fact that control of the cloud side of a connection isn’t always owned and sometimes simply can’t be owned by the end customers or managed by them really at any major level, how different is ensuring that the connections are secure and are there any common ways to accomplish it when cloud is on one or both sides of the connection?

Topic 3

[18:17] How are customers making the connectivity among highly distributed end points easier for those end users without sacrificing security?

Cloud Bites

[01:24] “It’s important to really understand your business needs regarding connectivity and work with your service provider or providers To understand really what you’re getting from a performance diversity and availability standpoint.” — Rob Stabile 

[01:50] “I’ll give you a hint: The cloud is not the [problem] that you need to be looking at. Your end users are a much harder problem to solve than Amazon, Azure or Google.” — Tom Hollingsworth 

[04:35] “Customer premises equipment for multi-wan and for fail over kind of sucks” — Trevor Pott

[05:36] “It’s about proximity. It’s not just about proximity to a cloud or proximity to your corporate data center, but proximity to things like content delivery networks matters.” — Trevor Pott

[11:15] “So I don’t really feel securing your data in the cloud is a difficult challenge. It is an operational challenge.” — Trevor Pott

[14:22] “You could throw as many people as you want at it, but at some point you can’t fit the scope of the network inside a human brain.” — Trevor Pott

[18:29] “The heart of this discussion and that’s scale. So you have to ask yourself, what is the important part of that connectivity? Is it getting people on the Internet or is it securing a connection once they’re there?” — Tom Hollingsworth

[21:01] “That means that you won’t have to have your IT department doing some kind of a herculean effort to stand up enough VPN concentrators on the week the world shut down so that your employees can still work.” — Tom Hollingsworth

[22:21] “The larger you are as an organization, then the more distributed your workforce, the more that you have to care about the locality of all of your applications and your connectivity points so that you don’t have a different working experience for people who work in different parts of the world. And that’s as much a retention problem for your employees as anything else.” — Trevor Pott

[24:09] “Ultimately, what it comes down to, and I think most of us are probably really seen this particularly the last couple of years, is that a mix of solutions might actually be required in most cases.” — Brian Knudtson