My Top Cloud Takeaways from Cisco Live Cancun

It was an amazing week. The vibe, the enthusiasm, lots of energy, smiling faces, nice and sunny days with the perfect scenario; the Mexican Caribbean.

Those who have attended any Cisco Live can testify to the above statement, and after such a week with so many things happening at the same time, you need some time to sit down think about the week and do some closing thoughts. Here are mine:

Opening Keynote.

Ruba Borno, Vice President of Growth Initiatives and Chief of Staff to CEO, kicked off Cisco Live on Monday doing an analogy of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with 6 imperatives for business digitization. According to Ruba’s blog, there are six imperatives every organization should be thinking about when approaching business digitization. The third imperative focuses on the multicloud world. I’ll continue this blog from there.

Cloud, Intercloud & Multicloud

An interesting topic circulating during the Cloud Days on Monday and Tuesday was: what happened with Intercloud? As you probably know it came to an end but I have some interesting final thoughts. The market move differently of what we thought it would happen and cloud providers grew faster in very innovative ways. However, the actual concept of customers having multiple cloud options it’s a reality. According to IDC’s 2016 CloudView survey, 84% of customers had plans to use multiple clouds and the latest numbers from the same study in 2017 now indicate that 94% of customers will use multiple clouds. It truly is a reality; IDC’s data also indicates that 58% of cloud adopters work with at least four cloud vendors and 15% work with at least ten cloud vendors. So, let’s start from here; there is no cloud and certainly no Intercloud ; ) but the industry indicates that It’s a multicloud world after all.

A sample of cloud adoption in LATAM

IDC has profiled several organizations around the world and has come up to a conclusion that there are 5 maturity levels with regards to cloud adoption:

Cisco, in collaboration with IDC, has developed a cloud assessment tool, the Business Cloud Advisor that can help organizations assess themselves in their cloud maturity level. During Cisco Live, we had some attendees doing the assessment and here are some findings:

According to IDC, there’s only 11% of global organizations interviewed who have an optimized cloud strategy and they have significant and tangible key performance indicators such as 11% of revenue growth, 87% in reduced times to provision IT services and 77% in IT cost reduction. I wonder why we didn’t have one from our Cisco Live results. Perhaps one of the following?

Lack of a formal governance process for reviewing and approving cloud service catalog items and operational policies.

Exploring reporting processes to integrate cloud into existing governance processes and policies.

Rationalize the IT procurement process to support a shift to subscription, pay-as-you-go pricing.

Evaluation and documentation of technical and business risks that are associated with different cloud services and platforms.

Who knows, every case is different. If you want to assess your organization, click here.

Cisco, Multicloud and Google

Every company is going through changes that are becoming radical for their business survival. In some cases, we’ve seen some “cloud mandates” which means that there is an instruction from the top down of the organization to go all cloud but what does that really mean? What does a cloud first strategy mean or cloud native? My point here is that to achieve any of those, you need to enable your infrastructure, your users, applications and data to run smoothly in a safe connection when traveling to or from the public cloud and making sure that you understand what the performance is. That is why, at Cisco, we believe that every customer needs to have a strong base in networking, security, analytics and management. By achieving this, you’ll be able to navigate in a fragmented and complex multicloud world.

We don’t optimize for one’s cloud. We help you enable your multicloud challenges and, we can also work with other great public cloud providers such as Google as per the exciting recent news.

Learn more about what Cisco can do for you. We are not just a “plumbing company.” We can really help you in such topics such as Kubernetes, Istio, Apigeee, through our alliance with Google, and other well known topics such as automation, orchestration and, of course, a network intuitive.

It was indeed an awesome week. Thank you @CiscoLiveLatam, I’ll continue my journey into this multicloud world!