Rhipe Cloud Channel Summit 2016 Breakout Session at the Primus Hotel, Sydney
The Rhipe Cloud Channel Summit 2016 was all about the challenges partners face dealing with the increasing momentum of Cloud deployments.
According to rhipe partner enablement specialist, Arron Stebbing, the shift is being driven entirely by customer need. He said the conversation has evolved into an organisational one and there has been a transition from the decision based on technical merit to a decision based on business reality and commercialisation.
“It is now a business decision to move to Cloud, it’s not a technical decision. Most customers are driven to the Cloud by CFOs and CIOs who don’t care how the service gets delivered to them; they care if it can answer the business conversation,” he added.
The Cloud company outlined key questions businesses should consider before moving into Cloud:
- What are the organisational problems we hope to solve?
- What sort of payment structure works best for us?
- Is our business focused more on CapEx or Opex spending?
- What of time and SLA do we require?
- What do our data security standards look like?
- Which compliance standards do we need to meet?
Stebbing also outlined recurring questions he has heard from a customer standpoint.
They included:
- What are our biggest pain points in our current environment?
- Does the Public Cloud model make sense for our business?
- What kind of workloads are we looking to support in the Public Cloud?
- Will we need to add bandwidth?
- Do we need to increase and decrease compute power?
- What kind of expertise do we need in a Cloud provider and how much management do we want to be responsible for?
- Which existing systems need to be integrated?
Where is your data?
A key part of the discussion surrounded where data is actually stored in the Cloud.
According to Stebbing, the fact that very little people know where the data sits, is a common trend. He said particularly within Australia, companies requires its data to stays on-shore, but if service providers dig deeper into the customer’s portfolio and requirements, often the subset of data that needs to stay local is minimal.
“More often than not, only one to two per cent of their data needs to stay locally. Everything else, they don’t care about. There is 85 to 90 per cent of unstructured data global data that sits outside of a database. Often, people don’t know what to do with it or where it sits,” he added.
