Cloud Strategies in Frankfurt | SUSE Communities

Cloud Strategies in Frankfurt

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Last week, I&O professionals from around Europe and beyond converged upon Kap Europa in Frankfurt for the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations, and Cloud Strategies Conference. Split over two days, the event was well attended despite flight delays and cancellations the night before. There were lots of great topics of discussion there, including the age old “is public cloud cheaper than my data centre”, building a cloud strategy, the future of infrastructures, the death of the data centre, edge computing, Internet of Things and much more.

The time has come, a fact’s a fact – have you still not written your cloud strategy?

As Midnight Oil once sang, “the time has come”. While they may well have been referring to returning Australian land to the first peoples of that country, in Frankfurt the message was that the time has come to write your cloud strategy. In fact, in the words of Gartner’s Scot MacLellan, the best time to write a cloud strategy was 5 years ago. The good news is though that the second best time is now.

Despite cloud being a well-used and accepted term in most businesses, there are still lots of organisations that have yet to define a fully-fledged cloud strategy. Not stating that your cloud strategy is a specific vendor (insert hyper scale public cloud provider of choice here), or even that you’re a cloud first company, but how your business will use the cloud.

We are family, I got all my sisters (and brothers) with me building a cloud strategy

Sister Sledge had it right – you can’t build a cloud strategy on your own, you need your corporate family with you. A cloud strategy isn’t just an IT strategy. It should also include the Line of Business teams – they are the ones that have been utilising Shadow IT in the past, so they need to be part of the overall strategy to ensure that it meets their needs and requirements.

Cloud definitions – what’s the story?

The Gallagher brothers were correct – you do need a little time to wake up, and then you can work out the definitions for your cloud strategy. Agree with your colleagues (and document) just what you mean when you refer to public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and more. Gartner have an IT Glossary, as do SUSE – use these to document just what you’re talking about.

All the small things (should include your cloud strategy)

While Blink-182 complained about late nights and work sucking (incidentally, work doesn’t have to be like that – check out the open roles at SUSE if yours is), they were on the right track with all the small things. Cloud strategies shouldn’t be War and Peace – they should be a relatively concise document (Scot MacLellan recommends 12-20 pages at most) that is a concise point of view on cloud and its role in your enterprise. It also shouldn’t be a fixed, point-in-time document – it should remain a living document, as companies and IT change constantly. This should then have follow-on documents that go into more detail around specific subjects like implementation or migration plans, security plans, etc.

Whether you’re looking to keep everything in-house as you have legacy applications that are too difficult to move to the cloud or have data sovereignty requirements, or if you’re a cloud-first company, or are even just starting to dip your toes into the murky waters of cloud, SUSE Cloud Solutions can help. From the edge to the core to the cloud, we’re here to give advice on how to use open source technologies to give your enterprise the best cloud to suit your cloud strategy. And if you enjoyed Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning, why not check out the parody by the SUSE Band?

 

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Matthew Johns I have over 20 years' experience in the IT, cloud and hosting industry gained in a variety of roles spanning project management to product release and product marketing. I’m responsible for product marketing for SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and have been working with OpenStack since it was released in 2010. Outside of work, I enjoy running, cycling, great beer (craft, cask, keg - call it what you like as long as it tastes good), spending time with my family, playing the piano and charity fundraising – I’ve been supporting the Movember Foundation since 2006, and have run multiple races, climbed mountains and cycled around the UK for many charities over the years.