SPC 2014: Tipping Point On-premise and Cloud

Rob Lamear, presented on the pros and cons of on-premise vs cloud.  Rather than give a one size fits all answer, he started with a series of questions and points to consider.  His first question was  on who is still running on premise: Most of the audience raised their hands.  Gartner says however that 2016 is the “Year of the Cloud.”   That’s only 24 months away.  So many in the audience now have a job on how to get to the cloud safely.
Landscape

• 36% want to control costs
• 35% focus IT resources on developer
• 28%finding cost effective infrastructure
• 25% better ways to collaborate
• Over the next year, many are doing some sort of cloud migration. (private, IAAS, SaaS, etc.)
• 2014 is the Midway point based on what Gartner said.

How to receive an F

• downtime
• response is too slow
• can’t scale
• auditor issues
• Nirvanix is a perfect example.  Had petabytes of data and then shuttered their doors   Begs the question about your exit strategy
  • If you have 128 Tb of data at a company and they shut the door, it will take 28 days to download that data via a 1 gig link

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Security needs to be discussed.   People stay on-premise because of control and the perceived lack of control in the cloud.  Many also find that they have sovereign issues. Google says they may store data wherever they choose.  This begs the question about which rules to which country apply.  This also begs the question about how to be in compliance with HIPAA, eDiscovery, and other needs.   You only have to do the audit once to want to be prepared the next time:
Good Quote: Multi-tenant is inherently more dangerous than on premise.
Risk: You have to ask the question on what are the risks?  How to mitigate the risks?  How to deal with the risk when it becomes an issue.   The NSA issue is big.   How easy is it to get access to that data in the cloud?  China is actually pulling out Cisco gear. They fear that all the Cisco equipment is compromised.  Who loses in China?  Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

The Cloud

The cloud has a number of tipping points or things that push you to use the cloud.
People: hard to find, hard to train, hard to keep.  If you lose an admin, it’s hard to fill. The cloud gives you an option for a managed service provider
Upgrade: They never go well. They are painful and expensive.  Every “in the know” person knows it’s hard.  Great example: client spent three months doing the upgrade.  Rob’s team did it in two days.  It all comes down to experience and knowlege.
Key upgrade question: Is there a better way to spend your money besided an upgrade
508,000 is the number of jobs being exported due to espionage.  This impact workforce, products, services, etc.  It leaves us in a less competitive position.
$11 – Price of USDA grade A hamburger in the US
$11,000,000 – the annualized cost of a breach.  It’s hugely expensive.  Target’s recent breach is a great example. It will cost them more than $130 Million.  They have multiple class action lawsuits filed so the price will continue to increase.
The Point of Service tool set was for sale in Taiwan. $2,000-$10,000 will get you these tools.
Security Bottom line: you can’t do security as good as a provider.  Office 365 spends far more on security than your company ever will. They are good at what they do. They have to be.
2014 – The year of security according to Gartner
Agility: It’s what makes the cloud special.  You can just get stuff done faster.
Reliability: It’s really hard to beat a providers uptime and reliability.  Have you estimated the cost of downtime?  It’s probably more than you think.
Innovation: Companies need to innovate faster.  Monsanto is doing farming as a service.   It’s about big data because Monsanto is telling him via an iPad.   This drives up yields for farmers.    They couldn’t do it without a big data center and the ability to implement it rapidly.
Optimize ==> Colocation
Transform ==> Managed services  (most of us are here)
Innovate ==> Managed cloud

So how do you get to Innovate?

The correct answer is hybrid.  Yeah, it’s a well used term but a valid one.  You see it in the in house owned budgets decreasing rapidly.  You also see it where outsourced cloud is on a steep increase. In two years, outsoured cloud surpasses in-house owned. (2016)
Your priorities

1. Stringent cloud security
2. Proven IT infrastructure
3. Best of breed technology
4. global scale
5. flexible contracts

Should I stay or should I go now?  (sung to the Devo song….)
Depends on the answers to questions.  What is your top priority?  What is your timeline? What stage is IT in?  Are they still optimizing or are they trying to innovate?  All of these help define what you should do.   The reality is that you are all going to the same place.