In today's fast-paced digital age, effectively leveraging cloud computing is both more important and more challenging than ever. With so many cloud options and so many potential pitfalls along the way, the process of cloud adoption and migration can seem daunting. I'm Jason Konzak, SVP of Flex Central Professional Services. I've been in the IT industry for over 2 decades now, helping organizations to transform and modernize their IT, including cloud adoption, cloud migrations and cloud Strategy. Joined today by I'm Michael Fitzgerald, Senior Director of Engineering with Flex Central Professional Services, leading the team of infrastructure transformation and joining us over the Internet is that's Rafael, I'll be there yet. I've been VMware. I'm a Sales Director for cloud providers strategic partners at Click Central and we were working together for over the past ten years on how to take the services to market. All right, thanks gentlemen. So today we're here to talk about the state of cloud for organizations and really talk about some of the things that are that are different now in 2023. You know clouds been computing has been around for, for quite a while at this point, but it's gone through an evolution over the years. And so really wanted to talk about what we're seeing now, what we're seeing in the industry, what our our customers are doing, what what some of the organizations who are adopting best practices and being innovative are doing. And you know what is it that's different today about cloud in 2023 than it might have been just a few years ago. Rafael, why don't we go ahead and start with you. Yeah, well cloud today is a lot more than I S right. It's ultimately about facilitating business outcomes. 94%, 4% of the leaders say that they use cloud services for the technology initiatives that drive business outcomes. But in this period of economic uncertainty, the organizations are looking to balance the detail innovation and cost efficiency through that. We've seen the embrace of multi cloud over the past two years after they have navigated the impact of the global pandemic well 38% of organizations reported using multiple clouds two years ago. That number has increased today to 64 and expected to grow to 72% over the next five years. But with the advantages of multi cloud comes from challenges for many organizations. A lack of consistency of across clouds has led to increase complexity, greater security risk and multiple other performance issues. So less than one and five organizations say they have reached a tipping point where the benefits of multi cloud outweigh the challenges and more than 70% organizations have struggled to drive fashionable value to the cloud. So now more than ever a comprehensive cloud strategy is key to effectively Dr. business. So, so really the the question in many ways is not just why cloud in in 2023, it's why multi cloud why, why more than one and and why maybe you know less than a giant number of cloud. Michael, you know one of the things that we should, we should probably start talking about is you know what does it really mean to to do cloud computing in 2023. Now it used to be that we would just say, oh, the cloud was somebody else's computer, but there's obviously a lot, a lot more to it. But why don't we just kind of level set on you know what is kind of you know what is cloud really and and and what is it today? Well, really right, cloud is defined by some essential characteristics, right. And that's having on demand services, right, that allow that scalability of systems and and services within the cloud broad network access right is really important as as a definition of cloud again that rapid elasticity, right, being able to grow the environment and shrink it right as needed is, is important. And then having some sort of measured or metered service, right that pay as you go type model that we see that's really common with cloud, right. And that that can really encompass a number of different kind of platforms and deployment models, right, private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service. And I think a lot of times there's there's nuance there and we we, we talk a lot about private cloud and public cloud for instance. And of course, within within each of those, there's there's many subcategories of different types of of clouds, environments depending on the type of access that you've got, how you're able to scale those, you know what some of the, you know, the underlying platforms are that are enabling it. So let's talk, you know, keeping it at a high level for a minute here about some of the things, you know, what's you know today in in 2023, what are some of the things that are driving organizations to the cloud today that were maybe they hadn't been doing so in the past as well as driving workloads away from the cloud. We're seeing some amount of repatriation into collocation, some organizations pulling things back on premise or looking at different models. Raphael, what's your sort of view of some of the drivers around increased or decreased adoption? Well, as you mentioned, right, there's multiple elements to this. The promise of controlling costs, right, We started with clock first has always been there has been a driver. But adding to that, the fast detail innovation has customers looking at cloud and you can move your business faster, you can get to your business outcomes. But as you take some challenges of remote work, cybersecurity, MNA, disaster recovery, the fastest way to get there has always has been the cloud. But wrapping adoption doesn't always translate to results. So right now we have a challenge of unexpected cost and challenges of migration and 27% of the leaders say that currently the CLASH initiatives are having issues driving some more value to their company. Like what are some of the things that that you're seeing in both both pulling organizations in the cloud environments or multi cloud environments and pushing them away from them. Definitely we see customers looking for cost savings, right. I think that's probably the biggest factor that we see. Other things we're seeing is progressing on a cloud first strategy. I think that that's been an initiative for many organizations, right, that we've seen for a few years now, right. And Dr. and failover, right. I think that's a common use for cloud. Even customers that are still running in on Prem or Colo environments, they're now seeing the benefit of having a cloud environment for the use of Dr. and some sort of failover, right. A J, yeah, I think it's one area where the cost savings are very real compared to building a secondary production environment for for Dr. purposes. It's interesting because I think the cost is a driver both towards and away from cloud environments. It is. It is a cost for the predictability is a thing that has driven customers away from the cloud. I think there's a lot of expected cost savings that organizations really try to gain when they move to the cloud. But there's also a lot more detail right to the financials of running a cloud environment that need to really an organization needs to pay attention to, yeah, cost predictability, cost modeling. Obviously there was once a cottage now quite thriving industry around cloud cost optimization. Our team does a lot of work in cloud cost optimization and right sizing. And I think what's interesting about that is it's not just about you know how good of a deal can you negotiate from a procurement perspective, but what are you doing around cost engineering? What are you doing architecturally? What are you doing to measure and right size your workloads to leverage you know scalability and and what are you doing to leverage various platform capabilities around high availability, right. So you know when you leverage a a robust stack, you use, you know be more high availability for instance, you know you don't necessarily need to create additional load balance instances that you might have to in other cloud environments. Let's talk about some of the other challenges that are getting in the way. Organizations say, hey, this sounds great. You know, I love cloud computing. I love all these different cloud providers. Let's go and do that and then come to find out that maybe this isn't working out quite as well as they had originally helped. What are some of the factors that are keeping organizations from getting those potential benefits that they might otherwise get? I think we can really say overall it's having an incomplete or inadequate hybrid IT strategy, right? And and that includes things like rave making ad hoc workload placement decisions, not having a good strategy around that, managing migrations poorly. Usually that has to do with dependency mapping, right? Understand dependencies of your workloads, women to cloud expertise, right. Moving into the cloud and and realizing that you don't have the internal knowledge right or expertise to be able to maintain and continue to run those environments optimally as well as security. I think security is a big thing. There's there's a lot of change in security from running an on premise infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, I remember early on object storage, you know was was by default open to the world and and created a lot of challenges. As an example there, Raphael, what are some of the things that you're seeing or maybe where there's greater complexity than folks realize as they embark on these journeys now one of the things we see quite often, it's just the whole risk of refactoring. Not only is it complex, when you go in, you know, you move an old house, you start finding things beyond the world you do not expect. Meanwhile, you have a project that's driven on a timeline and if you don't hit the timeline then you're going to have impact on the financial impact to the company. So mixed to those two things has always been a quite a challenge and we've seen many projects that was supposed to be one year and the being 234 year long and then the company never drives a savings and ends up getting into into more complex situations. So being very clear about what you're trying to do at a time, it's really important because there's a lot of a lot that goes behind and refactoring an application and you should kind of control that situation. That's a great point. I think it's really easy to to overlook in in some cases, especially because many organizations had early successes doing a lift and shift right. And so when you're able to take existing VM's and and import those over the new environment and treat things like for like it, it can feel easy to move into these environments right? But if you've got to to refactor change architectures to to leverage cloud capabilities especially if you've got older systems with code independencies, right, they they can be significant efforts there. I I think it's a great segue to talk about cloud strategy and and talk a bit about workloads because as as you mentioned earlier, Michael, you know cloud first sounds great, right? Like hey, the cloud's awesome, let's put let's put everything there. But there are challenges that go around portability around you know how well those models work with respect to the various workloads. And increasingly we're seeing organizations say you know our our strategies not to be cloud first or our our strategies to be cloud smart. So what are some of the things you know Raphael, some of the things that that you would advise you kind of on a high level for organizations thinking about their cloud strategy or or multi cloud strategy what what are some of the the first things you should be thinking about as you're embarking on this journey? Well, I can see as I can see two items up. First of all, you got to think about the outcome. A lot of times there's hyper focus, 11 specific need and you have to look where the business is going, where your plans are for the short, for the medium and long term and and work backwards that way. Not only does your strategy align better, it's higher chance of it hitting the dates and it also help you align through the correct cloud provider. So what we've seen is doing this whole process, our IT leaders are taking an offense and defense stance on the offensive trying to accelerate at the delivery cloud migration and in part of the employees with the defense that reducing cloud spend and modernize hybrid infrastructure and also manage zero trust of their enterprise. So that's why the whole idea of cost smart, you got to really think about what's not only what's going on in the IT layer but also across the business. So it all aligns up. So Michael how do we build that that cloud strategy had so, so we we come up with our our high level end state goal right. We have some ideas of the of the big picture elements to get there but when the rubber hits the road what are what are some of the building blocks kind of from the other side that that come together to create that strategy. I think there is really where we get into workload placement decisions, right and having a workload placement framework or workload placement strategy as part of that cloud strategy and and maybe even as the foundation of that. So, so before you get into that, you know how would you define a workload, what, what is like, what do we mean when we say workload placement, Good question. So, so workload is really any application or a data source that your organization needs, right, for its business to operate and that requires infrastructure to run Okay and then and then what are the things that you do Okay. So we say Okay, we've got a workload and as an example an ERP application, a CRM application, you know some some major line of business or minor supporting system. How do you then go from Okay? I've got a whole bunch of these to what is my cloud strategy, right, right. So that's where we implement A workload placement criteria framework, right, which really we categorize into three separate areas, right, technical, operational and financial criteria, right. And those looking at those really helps an organization make repeatable, data-driven decisions around workload placement, right. So technical things like looking at performance needs, looking at scalability, availability needs, dependencies is definitely a part of that as well, right? Operational needs, control and visibility of the environment, right, security and compliance concerns and then financial needs, right. What does that cost structure look like? Does it make sense to ship from CapEx to OpEx type decisions, right. And like we were saying before, cost predictability as well? Yeah, so, So some of those needs are really driven by the individual workloads. Some of those are going to be driven by the organization and they're going to be the same across all their workloads, right. Right. So the organization's preference for CapEx versus OpEx, organizational needs around cybersecurity and compliance frameworks, you know, I T skill sets, right. How much you know, do we have the right staff to be able to effectively operate environments in different cloud providers? What are some of the things, Raphael, that you think are really important for organizations as they're looking at a specific workload? Is there maybe 1 standout thing that you think organizations should be paying more attention to when they're trying to make these decisions about which cloud to put a workload into or how to leverage multicloud? One of the key things, right, obviously, apart from picking the correct cloud provider like everything that Michael just explained, right, it's exactly what we're talking about. That is to it to be in a partnership is also being able to move the workload in and out of whatever you want to place it. You want to have that flexibility. You want to own that workload so that you can make changes to your, to your, to your decisions. Being stuck in one place is not necessarily the best thing you want to do. So as part of the whole strategy you have to make sure that you have a way of moving the workloads to where it makes more sense in a year later it might move around right and the business keeps of all the. So I'm the flexibility and working with the partner that can help with the flexibility. It's key doing the whole the initial process absolutely. And I think it's a great segue to talking about you know, how you select the right cloud provider and making sure that it's a, it's a good fit for the organization and avoiding lock in I think is really a key element there. Rafael, what are some other things that that you think are significant to organizations? Obviously you work with a lot of cloud providers like Flexential. What are some of the things that are maybe a little less obvious to organizations as they're making those decisions about who they should work with? Yeah. One of the things you know the most successful cloud providers are the ones that that really sit down with the with the customer and figure out what's your business plan, what do you want to achieve the next few years and also share with them. This what we want to do as a cloud provider to grow and evolve to be ready for what you need as well. You know a cloud provider that only does one type of service is going to be limited in the flexibility and in the conversations are going to have with their customer. So I think it's really important to have a cloud provider that has a managed services team, has a professional services team, right. You never know when you need to react real quickly to something. You have a team that can be part of your organization to help you out through the through the migration or through an M and A or anything that's going on. That partnership is key. It's a lot more than just whether this part number is a little more expensive in this cloud provider or the other cloud provider. It is a relationship and you placing your business future in the hands of this provider. So that partnership is really key, yeah. And and certainly we're big fans of organizations that have professional services teams as as a as a big differentiator there. I think really a lot of it goes to kind of what is the support model, what's the services model. You know if if you're going with a provider and need to bring in two or three other partners just to be able to leverage their technology, You know that's something you want to make sure you're going into with your eyes wide open and as well as understanding. You know if you need to get a hold of someone you know how easy is that going to be, right? What is the the responsiveness, what is the flexibility of the organization. Michael, what are your thoughts? You know as far as maybe more from the technical side. You know some of the things that the organizations might not realize are are differences between various cloud providers. I I think that the, the biggest one that we see is connectivity right and connectivity performance as well, right as workloads, as as users and as organizations become more dispersed, that connectivity becomes the most important thing in an environment, right. And one of the biggest factors in performance right and usability and access into the environment right. So I I think a big consideration for organizations is choosing a provider that has the right connectivity right, that can disperse regionally that has high bandwidth, low latency connect redundant connectivity right. So that SLA's are high, right and performance is high for all the users and the customers. Yeah. And and I think having the ecosystem right and being able to have your your cloud environment, you know multiple cloud environments, Dr. environments, you know collocation environments, other services really all come together and interconnect is, is is so valuable there. You know especially so you know where you want to have multi cloud because it's strategic, you do because it's part of your strategy not because you need to plug holes because the provider doesn't have enough capabilities in their ecosystem to support all the needs of your organization. You know I think the other thing that that is really interesting we talked a bit ago about refactoring is looking at how your application architecture leverages the the cloud platform or doesn't right. Especially we talk about high availability differences in Slas. You know, we talk about load balancing and you know and just understanding you know the, the technical differences of various cloud platforms and how those relate to your applications because some applications frankly work better in some environments and others and and vice versa. What about you getting into those cloud environments. So it's great to say okay, we've got a strategy, we know what our workloads are. We figured out who the ideal cloud providers are going to be. We've narrowed that down to a reasonable number of cloud providers based on those operational, financial, technical criteria. But you know what about now? It's time to go ahead and and move those things in. You know what are you know, some of the best practices in in reducing risk and having successful migrations. Michael, why don't I start with you on that, given that your team runs hundreds of cloud migrations. Yeah. So really the, the key is having a cloud migration strategy, right. And that strategy should really address your migration challenges, right. And I think in there, there's, there's things that are really common that things are going to be unique to every organization, right. But we really see the common things of right. What do you need to identifying what you need to know up front, right? That's that's really key. Understanding your inventory, your dependencies, those connectivity needs like we just talked about, understanding performance needs and and any technical requirements of the workloads that might be there, right. And then once you kind of understand that, you'll be able to identify those risks, right, that exists and then how do we decrease those risks, right. And a lot of that is just really having good tests and validation plans as part of your migration strategy. That's key, right. And then minimizing disruption and downtime, right. Every single organization that we work with their, their biggest concern is downtime during a migration, right. And how can we work with them to have that downtime and any disruptions be the lowest they possibly can, right. And technologies like using replication right based technologies in order to prestage and move data and workloads is really really a common key factor to make that happen. Rafael what are some of the things you you you might want to add you you've obviously been you know working with customers and partners for a long time in in cloud migrations and and implementations what what are, what are some of the some of the things that you would advise organizations to think about as they're executing on migrations. Now one of the beauties of of working with the, with the cloporers like yourself that use VMware technology is that customers that use VMware. The migration is very, it's relatively simple, right. It's more like a lift and shift. You you do have to manage networking or other other items like that. But being able to quickly get to the cloud provider and then have your time with tools that you know very well to do any refactoring any changes and optimizations and allow your IT team to do their job right without being under the pressure. We need to quickly migrate. We need to show that this platform need to move over to the cloud provider and that's where mistakes happen. So I think this type of migration, it's really powerful and I've seen thousands of projects that he had that tool that made a big impact, right? Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to go ahead and do another deep dive session in the cloud migrations in an upcoming Flex talk. So look for that soon. We're going to go further into elements of a successful cloud migration planning exercise as well as you know testing, execution, all the elements that go into that. As we wrap up today, you know really wanted to talk a little bit about kind of the, the key take away some of the the big things that organizations might not be thinking about. You know Michael, me I'll start with you. You know what's really you think that the key things that organization should be thinking about when they're looking at cloud in 2023 or multi cloud in 2023. Yeah for me the biggest take away is to have a cloud strategy right and that strategy aligns with the organization's business objectives right. And also that that strategy includes some some criteria framework to make good workload placement decisions to really know what the right cloud provider is and and what the best location for your workloads are awesome. Raphael, what what is your your key takeaways there. For me top of mind has always been picking the right cloud provider right. And as I mentioned it's not just about you know pricing of the specific product, it's about the relationship and the strategy of that cloud provider long term. And and this the type of business that put together in the and how well they're doing with the rest of the in the market, rest of the customers because when you look under the hood, it's not all the same. My experience as being with our, with our cloud providers, their Slas, their performance, you know the level of service they give to our customers is much higher than you normally get in a in a public cloud or or all the type of cloud providers. Absolutely. And and and I think it's key to know that, you know there's there's a ton of great resources out there from, you know, partners like VMware, you know, organizations like Flex Central, Professional Services. There's there's a lot of expertise and knowledge of organizations who've gone through cloud transformations before, who've done cloud migrations, who've built cloud strategies and you know and and to get help because there's a ton of great resources that are out there to that. To that end, this Flextalk has a attachment that you can download a resource on on workload placement strategy and criteria. Michael and his team have put that together. It's a great resource. So I would definitely encourage you to download that. Thank you very much for joining us and until next time, Flextalk.