Hybrid Cloud Congress Highlights – Part 2

An insightful panel discussion I attended had two heavy-weight panelists – Fernando Velazquez, CTO – Digital Transformation & Innovation Director, Walmart and Luiz Gondim, CTO at Z-Tech and Global Vice President, Innovation, Anheuser-Busch InBev. Both suggested that latency was the single-most-important factor in their cloud provider selection process.  Low latency is a well-known differentiating feature of the Equinix Fabric, which provides interconnection to all their datacenters globally as well as extends it to the top public cloud providers.

Luiz and Fernando spoke of security, governance, automation/orchestration, multi-cloud capability, containerization and single-pane-of-glass as the other areas that matter the most in their cloud journey (alas without specifics).  An interesting point Luiz made was that they don’t trust cloud provider dashboards and encouraged the audience to develop their own.  This will become important in the multi-cloud landscape but is no easy task and very costly.

It is important to note that while neither of the speakers represented banking, government, or the healthcare sector, they made it clear that they don’t trust public cloud providers with the security of their most sensitive data. They spoke about anonymizing data prior to uploading it to the public cloud or just keeping it at the edge, where they feel it is more secure. Clearly, there are now capabilities that public cloud vendors offer that give the customer capabilities to secure their data and control master keys to it in the public cloud. As an example, consider the recent Amazon transformation of the Lumos internal payment system handling billions of transactions securely by transitioning it to a 100% cloud-based, all-native AWS platform. But many Fortune 100 companies in the retail and consumer sectors still want to have more flexibility and control than any one of the public providers offers.

The last session I attended was presented by Jennes Zhang, Global SVP, CTO of IT, P&G. Jennes has provided amazing visibility into the digital estate at P&G.

P&G currently is present in AWS, Azure and GCP with long term plans to remain in at least two out of the three providers. He reiterated their commitment to cloud-native initiatives in the long-term.

Jennes explains why the in-between (Equinix colos and low-latency fabric) spaces that provide ability to interconnect all clouds are key to their business. P&G has 110 manufacturing plants. That is a huge cloud edge! Agility and transparency are easier said than done when it involves such scale.

There is no doubt that smaller businesses can do more with less and may not need multi or hybrid cloud strategy for their successful business vision. However, in the world of large enterprises – the key decision factors end up being:

• Low latency across the multi-cloud
• Independent fully controlled governance, monitoring and security

If you would like to speak to a PTS subject matter expert more about how cloud adjacent solutions and/or colocation facilities can fit into your data center plans, contact us to schedule some time for a chat.