Where do we go next – Journey to the Cloud – Grant Caley – Ep 130

There is no doubt the world has changed in many ways in the last 3 months, the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it has been something we have not witnessed before. From a technology point of view, it has presented many challenges, delivering remote IT at scale, stretched VPN’s, scale, flexibility, support, security, the list is long. However as things start to change we are starting to turn our attention to returning to some kind of “normal”, but this also presents an opportunity to us, the chance to take what we have learned over this period and use it to better plan what we do next, so that next time we need to react quickly to change we can do it better.

To help with the “what next” planning is a short series of shows looking at that topic and we start with something at the top of most agendas, the use of public cloud. It has become clear that those who already had a solid cloud strategy and had moved several services into a cloud environment were certainly better equipped, at least technically, to more rapidly respond to the almost overnight changes we needed to enact to keep our enterprises operational, than those that were still focussed on traditional datacentre approaches. Regardless of how you currently use the cloud it is one of the first of the “what next” discussions, regardless of whether you are in or out of the cloud you are asking, what does my journey to better utilising the cloud look like?

To help me to explore this first topic is first time guest to the show, but long time industry friend, Grant Caley, he is Chief Technologist for NetApp in the UK and Ireland and brings with him 20 years of experience in helping enterprises change the way they operate and of course, in most cases, this now means how they use the cloud. Before you worry this isn’t just Paul talking to NetApp again, it’s important to be clear, in this episode Grant offers advice that is important for any enterprise to consider when moving to the cloud, this is nothing to do with whether you are a NetApp customer now or have ever been, Grant shares some of his wide-reaching experience of what areas an enterprise needs to consider when evaluating, designing for and moving to the cloud.

In this show we discuss.

• What is a “journey to the cloud”?
• COVID-19 accelerating the demand.
• Do not throw away your datacenter good practice.
• Cost, cost, cost.
• Data is often the biggest problem in the datacentre, that does not change in the cloud.
• What you lose moving to the cloud.
• What should the areas of focus be?
• Be flexible.
• The NetApp cloud story.
• Building bridges.

Grant provides some great insight and raises a range of crucial points when it comes to cloud, cost, security and the importance of treating your cloud infrastructure as you would your datacentre. I hope you found it as useful a session as I did. To find out more about the work NetApp is doing in public cloud visit cloud.netapp.com and to catch up with Grant you’ll find him on Linkedin as well as twitter @GrantACaley.

If you have an idea for a show or would like to appear as a guest why not contact me via email podcast@techstringy.com or via twitter @techstringy.

Next time we talk about how to rethink the way we work from different locations, to catch that show why not subscribe.

Until next time, thanks for listening.