From the experts: What is the state of the cloud?

• Explain the cloud to me like I’m five years old or 85 years old.

• How has the cloud impacted your life?

• How has the cloud impacted your organization or other organizations?

• What was the catalyst that moved you into the cloud?

• What’s the number one advantage of cloud computing?

• What’s the number one struggle with cloud computing?

• What’s the biggest myth about cloud computing?

• When is a lift-and-shift migration a good idea?

• When is multicloud a good idea?

• If you’re just getting started with cloud computing, what’s your first move?

• What is your number one piece of cloud computing advice for CIOs?

“It’s stuff that doesn’t exist in the house that we’re able to use very much like stuff that does exist in the house.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Years and years ago, people had to generate their own electricity to power their lights. So they had to build these humongous power plants just beside their houses or companies to get power to their lights. We don’t think about that anymore. We just plug our lights into the wall and electricity comes to them. 

Cloud computing is doing the exact same thing that power plants did to generate electricity to data centers and computers. So that companies, academics, governments, and individual developers can get access to amazing amounts of computing power and tools to power their business with just the flick of a switch.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“The cloud is like you are borrowing your friend’s computer to do your homework.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“You know how when we go to Disney World and we need to rent a van because my sports car isn’t big enough to carry the entire family? That’s the cloud. When you need something bigger than our little computer can handle, we can go out and rent those resources from somebody else.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“Cloud is like an amazing digital business canvas that you can paint your digital business deliveries on really quick.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Think of the cloud as somebody else’s computer, networks, and a place to store your data that you can rent.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“The cloud essentially is these massive data centers hosted by large tech companies like Microsoft or Amazon. Think about Uber or Netflix. When you’re consuming those products, the technology they’re being powered by is running in the cloud.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“It’s changed the face of how we do IT.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“It’s been my career for the last two decades. I started my career as an engineer at Bloomberg, developing cloud-based analytics for financial services professionals. I built a private cloud at Bloomberg (and I learned why you shouldn’t do that the hard way). 

Then I went to Dow Jones to be their CIO in 2012. I helped them through a big move to the cloud, which made us much more efficient in how we operated. To put that in perspective, we went from a few software releases a year to hundreds every week by the time I left. 

And over the last decade, I’ve now been with two cloud providers. I worked at AWS for eight years and now Google for close to a year, spending my time helping the world's largest companies move.” 

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“The cloud changed the trajectory of my career. It has allowed me to think up an idea and have it in production the next day. Every crazy idea I dream up, I can have out and available to everyone in a couple of days.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“Those things that I don’t want to do when I need bigger resources, whether it’s been in my career, being able to do more with less, or when I’m creating something specifically to share with other people, the cloud enables me to do that. It’s really been impactful in both my personal and professional life.” 

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“First, it’s gotten me a lot of cool T-shirts. Second, it’s definitely accelerated my career and made me a better technologist. Third, it’s probably annoyed my teenagers because they’re tired of hearing about this topic. I’m hopeful some of them will be inspired to go be generative AI specialists or developers at the end of the day.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“It’s totally changed my life. What used to take me three to six months—installing an Oracle database cluster or installing everything in a datacenter—I can now do in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“I work in the cloud, so it's impacted my life from a career perspective. Also, I’m a consumer of cloud. I use cloud for storing pictures and videos and sharing stuff with other people, including family members. And from a career perspective, that’s how I make a living, so I’m able to provide for my family through cloud.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“It allows us options in terms of leveraging other resources that we don’t happen to own or have to maintain. Therefore, it allows us to scale and move very quickly.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“I think the first thing I hear from organizations is how fast they’re now able to move and how quickly they’re able to innovate because they have that light switch they can just turn on and spin up computing capacity capabilities in just a moment. So I think speed is number one. 

And companies are always looking to save money, particularly when they’ve had to overbuild a lot of their infrastructure and data centers to plan for a capacity they rarely hit. I think the second is big companies look to try to save money with their move to the cloud.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“The cloud, in general, allows all the organizations I’ve worked for to produce better software faster. Overall, it’s fun developing in the cloud because you can have an idea and have it in your client’s hands in a matter of months.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“It allows me to compete with larger organizations by hosting our website, running surveys, or being able to do things that we couldn’t do with individual programmers all in just a few minutes,  deploying some pretty incredible technology.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“It’s really created momentum and excitement. I think in financial services, we finally reached that inflection point where the question is no longer ‘Are we going or not?’ The questions are: how fast can we get there, how do we get there safely, and how do we get there yesterday.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Organizations can get things done much faster. They can scale up really really quickly and scale back resources when they don’t need them anymore, so money is never wasted.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“The thing I’ve really loved to see about cloud for organizations is it leveled the playing field. And what I mean by that is traditionally (before cloud), you had to be a really big company, with really deep pockets, to have the technology to do certain things. Now, you can be a smaller company, like a startup, and pay for what you use and have access to these large systems and great technology through the cloud at a fractional cost.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“It was the ability to get to a more agile and flexible architecture that’s able to scale at the needs of business without pushing me into owning equipment or data center space.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Speed. It was definitely speed. I spent a couple years trying to build a private cloud at one company, and I went to another that was on the same trajectory. We just weren’t able to deliver features and capabilities for our customers as fast as our customers had come to expect them and as fast as our competitors were able to do that. In a big enterprise context, your biggest competition is often the startups that you haven’t even heard of yet. And they’re using the most modern tools and the most modern capabilities to move super quickly.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“Personally, I believe in reinventing myself. I went from a Java engineer to a cloud engineer, and right now I’m dabbling with machine learning. It’s all about reinvention and staying relevant.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“It was probably peer pressure more than anything else. All of my peers were doing it, so I had to do it, too.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“On a personal level, I remember trying to talk somebody out of cloud many moons ago. I hate to say it now, but I’ve got to own it. And then I watched what was possible. Things we always wanted to do in technology in terms of people delivering rapidly, understanding cost, managing, and being on top of the story end to end. When I saw it happen, in that moment it was like the light bulb pulled, and I had to change my career and head in that direction. That was about eight years ago. Never looked back since. 

From a firm perspective, every firm that I’ve been at, the minute that light bulb moment happens and you get a taste of what’s possible, you’re never going to look back. There’s an experiment, some legal and risk conversations, and then it’s how do we go faster. It’s just an exciting time to be in technology.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“I realized that people with skills designing infrastructure for data centers were on borrowed time. I also realized that if I wanted to get on the best projects, then I had to learn cloud computing, and I had to do it fast.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“I saw the writing on the wall. The on-premises technology was just moving slower. It was slower to adopt change and make things happen. And all the big tech companies were innovating faster in the cloud.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“I think ultimately it’s going to be flexibility and agility. Your ability to take your business to the next level and basically operate your business on rails. The more you change, the more flexibility you need, the more value cloud computing is going to have.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Moving fast.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“Rapid innovation. Being a single developer working on applications versus working for a company, I’ve just seen the ability to quickly put solutions out there.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“That you don’t have a ton of startup costs. So speed to value.” 

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“I think we all have a need for speed in the digital age. So the need for speed, that’s my number one advantage.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Flexibility. The ability to grow your infrastructure as you need to and shrink it down when you don’t need to anymore. And the ability to really easily and quickly try out a new idea, and if it doesn’t work, tear it down and start again.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Being able to move super fast.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“I think it’s understanding the complexity behind it. It’s basically one complex system into another complex system. So even though some aspects of cloud computing are easy, most of this is net-new technology that we’re learning as we go.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Change management.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“What I’ve seen is being able to close the cloud skills gap and having engineers who are able to transition their knowledge to the cloud.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“Once you get to a steady state of operations, you can do it cheaper on your own.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“The number one struggle is talent. It’s really still all about people. And, from a people perspective, as Mr. Jassy says, there’s no compression algorithm for experience. We can’t hire enough because there’s not enough out there. We’ve got to train them, and we’ve got to give people time and space to do that.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Cloud changes all the time, and it’s a major struggle to stay up-to-date with the latest innovations and the latest best practices so that we can make the right decisions.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Don’t overthink it. If you’ve been in tech for a long time, the skills you’ve had in the past still apply to cloud. Jump right in there and start working with it. Start exploring.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“That it’s cheap. It’s almost never cheap. You’re going to need the agility value proposition and the innovation value proposition to make it worth the money.

Ultimately, the myth is it’s going to lead to operational cost efficiency. It will lead to operational cost efficiency only if you value what cloud can do and you have the expertise around to make the correct decisions. There’s lots of good decisions to be made in order to get to operational efficiency. People assume that isn’t the case, and it’s going to happen automatically. But that will not happen.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“The biggest myth about cloud computing is that it’s too hard to get started. Just get started.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud 

“That it’s cheaper than on-prem. I will say startup costs are typically lower, but over time, it probably averages out to be about the same.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“That it’s cheaper than on-premises computing.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“That you should be afraid of it. Fear doesn’t accomplish much. Knowledge is power. Going and learning is hugely valuable. 

Another one is that regulators don’t approve of it. If you’re in the financial services space, the regulators are all using it at scale and in anger. The truth is, they’re all using it for their own shops, and they’re eager to help people get there because it solves a number of problems for them, too.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“That it’s hard or difficult to learn. But it's not hard to learn; it just takes effort and focus.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“That it’s some magical place in the sky. It’s basically someone else’s data center. There’s a lot of new technology and automation in the cloud that it would be a lot harder for you to do as a company. But other than that, it’s someone else’s data center.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“It’s when you can find a direct analog that exists on the cloud and you do not have to do a lot of remediation to make it local on that cloud provider. Other than that, you’re going to have to do a lot of refactoring and remediation to make that application aware of the cloud native capabilities.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Lift and shift is good when you need to get out of a data center really quickly. Modernizing, optimizing, and building cloud native is really good when you know you have new business requirements or opportunities on that particular application.” 

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“When time is of the essence. If you don’t have the time to re-architect your solutions specifically for the cloud, just lift it and shift it. That’s the best way to go.” 

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“When it is a landing zone and a temporary spot. Other than that, it’s not so good of an idea.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“If you looked at most financial company’s tech stacks and zoomed out your eyes, you’d find that 29% – 40% of them are vended from third parties. Where those third parties aren’t going fast enough to SaaS, you might need to lift and shift their workload because your ability to re-influence the re-architecture of their workloads is maybe a little bit diminished. 

The other thing is it doesn’t always make sense to spend the kind of money to re-architect everything you need. Sometimes a lift and shift, where you’ve got something that’s pretty static that you’re not going to be changing often, is the right strategy for that. 7 out of 10 times maybe I’d say rebuild with infrastructure as code versus straight lift and shift. 

That’s another early myth, I think, of the journey in the cloud: nothing can be lifted and shifted, and everything must be re-architected and rebuilt. You certainly get some value, but it’s an expensive journey to take. You could even do lift and shift and then re-architect. There’s options on the journey.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“It’s hardly ever a good idea. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s a short-term solution. Ultimately, you will pay the price. You’re kicking the problem down the road, so don’t do it.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Lift and shift is good if you’re looking for an entry point, just a way to get started with cloud. If you’re a company and you have a contract that’s ending, or you need to free up space and get out of a lease or something, lift and shift is an option.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“It’s a good idea when you want it to deal with flexibility and variety. In other words, we’re dealing with best-of-breed technology, so we’re going to need the best AI systems and the best database systems. So we open up the selection process to all the cloud providers.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“You should pick the right tool for the job. Multicloud is good for different parts of the portfolio. I would be very careful to try to architect a single application across the clouds.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“Multicloud is great when you don’t want vendor lock-in.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“When you have the skill to maintain multiple clouds. Other than that, stick to one cloud.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“It’s a great idea when you’ve got a strategy because it allows you to embrace the best-of-breed technologies for your particular application.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Chances are, you have shadow IT in your organization. So there’s probably already a department using cloud. And then when organizations decide ‘hey, we’re really going to do this cloud thing,’ they typically decide on a different cloud. So you will typically end up with multicloud. So I’d recommend you just be prepared to manage that.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“I think your first move is to understand what cloud computing is. Understand everything you can and basically do some internal planning and reflection on what your current as-is state is, as to where your to-be state needs to be, and how that can include cloud.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“There’s no substitute for experience. One, just get started. Pick an application or use case that is important to your organization (but not so important that if you fumble around with it for a couple weeks that you’re going to get fired) and do it.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“My first move would be to take my certified practitioner course and earn my foundational-level certification.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“Understand the use case and the business case. Why are you doing what you’re doing? How is it going to return value to the business?”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“Make sure you bring everyone with you. It’s not a journey to be done alone. It’s not a journey to be done without all the partners and stakeholders. Build a coalition of the willing. Start small and scale and keep rolling the snowball.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Jump in the water. Start by doing a little bit each day. Definitely get some hands-on experience. Before you know it, you’ll have built a serverless website in no time.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Go out to an organization like Pluralsight and take some courses. Pluralsight also acquired A Cloud Guru, which has playgrounds (cloud environments that you can use for four hours). I’d recommend going to the playground, launching one of them, and exploring. Start playing around with cloud. You don’t have to be afraid of breaking or crashing anything. You can just play around and get your feet wet.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

“Get the talent that you need. Ultimately, splurge on getting the people in the organizations. Surround yourself with expertise, whether that’s consultants or employees, who can help you make the right decisions in moving to the cloud or any technology.”

—David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer, Deloitte Consulting

“Just get started.”

—Stephen Orban, VP of Migrations, Google Cloud

“If you haven’t considered migrating to the cloud, you need to do it. If you don’t, you’re going to lose out to your competitors.”

—Kesha Williams, Cloud Residency Director, Slalom

“That it is just one of many forms of computing that you will use. Hybrid cloud infrastructure is the future. You will have hybrid cloud or cloud plus. Cloud isn’t a replacement for all.”

—Keith Townsend, Founder, CTO Advisor

“First, I’d just highlight from a couple of CIOs who I’ve worked with, start with the CIOs. The first thing we do is go through practitioner or fundamentals training. Essentially, it makes everybody fluent in what the cloud is. What you see is people who have been in technology for a long time suddenly connect dots and get very excited about what’s possible and understand what this is all about. 

For the CIOs, I’d say, you have to know the cloud and think holistically about it. The whole organization is waiting for you as the leader to get on board and set the beacon on the horizon at the right spot so they can follow you that way. When you really get out of the way of the engineers who really love the cloud and want to do this, you’ll see engagement and productivity like never before.”

—Tom Jackson, Chief Cloud Strategist, Northern Trust Corporation

“Have lunch or be lunch. If you’re not embracing the cloud, you’re missing a trick.”

—Faye Ellis, Principal AWS Training Architect, Pluralsight

“Pick an application that is critical to the business as the catalyst for moving to the cloud. Take that application and look at how you can optimize that app in the cloud. Are there things you can do from an automation perspective to reduce cost or increase the speed at which your business can gain an edge over competitors? Use that as the catalyst once you have all the other ducks in a row to help with funding and prioritization.”

—Steve Buchanan, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

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