The sun is shining today in the beautiful and historic town where the temperature is frigid, but the Habs and Cloud Computing are heating up the city.
After sitting in on the first set of keynotes I thought I would sit down and put some of my thoughts (and the speakers notes) to paper for the benefit of those of you that haven't been here.
Believe me, for a free event - Master the Cloud is well done - and if you can make it out to either Toronto, Vancouver, or Calgary in the coming weeks I highly urge you to get there.
First up was Dave Frederickson (VP GM, HP Canada) who goes by @FreddyatHP on Twitter. Dave talked about the incredible opportunities that cloud computing is creating for HP's customers who have grown to rely upon the old school IT which has become slow, bloated, and unfortunately insecure.
Cloud computing, in Dave's words, provides the customer an unparalleled chance to jump into a new computing paradigm which sheds some of the legacy issues and enables business agility, responsiveness, and the excessive costs associated with unused capacity most of our organizations have humming along in our data centers.
These are things you rarely think about until you sit down and figure the incredible cost-savings potential in a well run cloud environment... it made me think...
Of course, let's not fool ourselves, there's no magic switch to flip that will make an organization capable of consuming the benefits of the cloud overnight; there are growing pains, acquisition costs, and opportunity costs too which must be balanced out.
In the end though, I'm with Dave, when we consider how things are going, and we're honest with ourselves, many of our organizations are prime for a cloud revolution.
I also took down some statistics that caught my attention ...
- Businesses are adopting cloud computing at a rate of 2.5x to 5x faster than IT according to the various analyst firms
- 79% of CxOs are hesitant to adopt cloud because of fear of vendor lock-in
- 75% of CxOs are hesitant to adopt cloud because of performance and availability concerns
- 70% of CxOs are concerned about security when thinking about the cloud
- 63% of CxOs are concerned about the integration of various services involved with delivery of critical business functions
Those metrics speak volumes to me. Notice that almost 3 out of 4 CIOs are worried about security, and nearly everyone is afraid of being locked into a single vendor once they've adopted a specific implementation of cloud computing.
This is where standards and the work of the Cloud Security Alliance are so important, we here at HP are doing everything we can to help our customers feel better about not being 'locked in' too with our adoption of OpenStack over some of the other less flexible platforms.
Security... something near and dear to my heart - is always top of mind. It's good that leadership is thinking about security when we think about cloud computing - but what's really being done about it?
I think that question is answered nicely through some of the things coming out of our Enterprise Security business unit, and the various partnerships and collaborations we have industry-wide with companies like Intel and Microsoft and many, many others.
So far, the sentiment here has been that there is nothing to fear, and that cloud is here and now. I think we can mostly agree, as security professionals, that this is a good thing when adopted with the proper business and technology risk taken into account.
As I look around at our partners, and talk to companies like VMWare, I can clearly see that through tight integration with our HP TippingPoint platform, for example, we're thinking about security in everything we're advising our customers on.
Stay tuned... this is so exciting, and the energy at an event of 500+ executives is outrageous... I only wish I spoke French!
Cross-posted from Following the White Rabbit