We already know why Cloud Data Platform are a new Eldorado for enterprises. Cloud Technology is accelerating companies in their digital transformation journey by offering an infinite scalability, a centered and shared data and an easy infrastructure maintenance for businesses. But let’s take a look a little bit deeper and ask ourselves what are the golden rules for companies when they are switching to the Cloud in our podcast episode.
Whether you have decided to move your business or not to the Cloud, some key questions are important to have a better understanding of what you can do or should avoid as a business.
What should you consider when your business is moving to the Cloud?
Our Business & Decision Expert Podcast strive to answer business questions in the domain of Data & Digital for your company’s digital transformation. For this episode, our experts will share more technical details and answered some key questions for any business when they want to move to the Cloud.
What we will discuss in this podcast episode:
- How do I know that my company is ready for a move to the Cloud?
- What is happening with the legacy solutions and tooling for a business?
- What are the differences between the main Cloud Platform providers in the market?
- What are the consequences from moving to the Cloud in terms of internal skills?
Gerrit Denayer, Business & Decision Marketing Director, received around our table three Data experts to answer those questions:
- Mick Levy, Business Innovation Director at Business & Decision
- Luka Riester, Head of Innovation at Business & Decision
- Wim Decoodt, Big Data Architect at Business & Decision
Listen to the full podcast:
Gerrit: How do I know that my company is ready if my company wants to move to a Cloud Data Platform? Is there like some metrics that we can have? Is there some prerequisites that we should look at? Is there any good reason?
Luka: There’s always a good moment and good reason but you need to find it. Companies need to find that. I think we, as technologists, think is that Cloud and Cloud services, Cloud in general, is much more ready than 2, 3, 5 years ago. So are the companies ready for that? Well, it depends on the company, obviously. And it depends on who’s making the decisions. I’ve seen a lot of companies that are quite mature in terms of what they do with technologies, etc. but they’re still very hesitant on on the Cloud, simply because they have some key stakeholders in the organization that are maybe not willing to make the jump, to have this mindset that the move to the Cloud is a one off thing where we strongly advocate against as well. We believe in this progressive approach towards the Cloud. That is a simple kind of showstopper for them. You know legislation was a showstopper for a long time.
Gerrit: It would go to any Cloud types of application I guess…
Luka: Yes, I am talking about Cloud, not only about Cloud Data Platforms there. But that’s a precursor. Your organization needs to be ready to adopt the Cloud. We signed our first project in 2015 with data or Hadoop actually in the Cloud. But between then and now, we still see companies that are not willing to use Cloud at all because of their internal reasons. But to answer the question how could the company be ready to go for a Cloud Data Platform? Well first of all, they need to be ready to adopt the Cloud and secondly, once they adopt the Cloud they need to start really rethinking their data across the ecosystem. Because if they are not in the Cloud, and if they are, let’s say, a mid or big size company, they will already have some data platform, or some data platforms, which they need to think about it as this competency now needs to go to the Cloud.
So if I move into the Cloud, there’s a cost of moving that to the Cloud. So how do I justify that? You know, and that’s the first question that usually they ask themselves. In that same sense, they need to be ready to make that investment that needs to be backed up by some use cases that can yield a good return on investment.
Wim: I would like to complement that it is not only a matter of saying “Okay are we moving to the Cloud” but it’s very important to see what is really the added value of going to the Cloud. So if we really look at the difference: savings that can be done also in terms of analytics & additional possibilities that you have and then you look at the different domains that you have, what are the gains against the cost. We will take into account in the decision on which parts that can be progressively move to the Cloud.
Gerrit: So in general, we can say that all modern ETL’ish’ tools and platforms, they are cloud enabled as well, there is not many tools that are left behind
Companies need to be ready to make that investment which needs to be backed up by some use cases that can yield a good return on investment.
Luka Riester
Luka: Well no, I would not really agree on that. Because today, we talked about also cloud native and legacy tools. We see frameworks popping up every day that are more cloud native, and they’re in that way more adapted to your new environment. Now the problem with that is that a lot of companies will, if they start going towards the cloud for their data, workloads, they will find themselves in the hybrid approach. And that’s where I think some of the legacy tooling is still quite good, because they can solve, let’s say, the legacy problems that we still know, are complex. And can take over some of the workloads that are more cloud based workloads. So that’s a complexity. And actually, it’s not just a complexity, it’s something that will be kind of different in every customer that we see. Because they will have their own mix and match and blend of services (…).
Business & Decision Expert is a podcast where we talk about Data, AI & Digital topics. We receive every month Data & Digital experts to discuss how Data is revolutionizing our daily lives and we strive to answer business question related to digital transformation. We aim to gather a community of Data passionate people around our podcast where everyone can learn something in a relaxed and fun way.
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